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all 'FILE EXPLORER' FILE icons flashing whenever dropbox is running

As of today drop box is causing the file icons in ANY/ALL open explorer windows to flash constantly between the correct icon image and the default windows 'no icon' icon.

if i KILL the dropbox process magically all the icon switching stops, thi sis constant and doesnt seem to stop!

What can i do?

I also seem to have 3 DropBoxThumnbailGenerator.exe processes running?

Thanks

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Lusil

Hi there @alan78,

Welcome to the Dropbox Community!

Let's see what we can do on this.

At first, could you please let me know what the Dropbox icon shows when you hover over it in your system tray?

Also, could you please confirm for me if you've tried rebooting your computer? Maybe that will do the trick.

Let me know what you find!

tuneman76

A customer of mine is having the same issue. The flashing mostly occurs on her desktop but occasionally in other folders as well. When I pause Dropbox it stops.

It started after upgrading the account from free to plus and then copying 22 GB of data into the Dropbox folder.

I restarted the computer twice and the behavior continues.

When I hover over the Dropbox icon in the system tray it just says it's syncing the data.

My customer is running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit.

Lusil

Hey @tuneman76,

Welcome to the Dropbox Community - I'd be more than happy to help!

Although it sounds like the desktop app is trying to sync the new content throughout their account, to ensure I have a solid understanding of what the behavior is, could you please elaborate a bit on what you mean that there is "flashing"?

For example, are file icons in their Dropbox desktop app flashing? Does this happen to other folders outside of the Dropbox folder? Are there any errors?

Any additional info would be very helpful. Thanks!

tuneman76

It's just as alan78 has described it above except for me it's the desktop icons and occassionally icons from other folders as well. None of the folders mentioned are in the Dropbox folder. There are no error messages.

Lusil

Thanks for getting back to me, @tuneman76.

Initially, I'd recommend giving the desktop app some time to sync the new content and, in the meantime, check out this article. Although it lists ways to tackle high CPU/RAM usage, maybe one of them will do the trick.

If the behavior persists though, I'd suggest asking the user who is having this issue contact our Support team directly due to account-specific info that may be required.

In any case, let me know how it goes or if you have any other questions!

alan78

it is all file icons on the desktop and any open explorer windows.

They repeatedly switch between the default windows icon and the icon for the file type.

this has nothing to do with the dropbox app visibly although the issue stops when I stop dropbox via the task manager.

no errors

Walter

Hello peeps (@alan78 & @tuneman76)!

Sorry to jump in but have you by any chance tried a reinstall of our desktop app on the affected computers?

If that doesn't help, could you give a clean, advanced re-install a go and let us know if you're still noticing this issue?

robertcz

Same issue here, but with well over a million files in my Dropbox, I am not particularly keen to reinstall and wait a week or two for a reindex. Will monitor this thread. Am interested in whether a solution comes up.

My situation is the same: Windows 7, 64bit. Haven't tried killing dropbox yet, so am not sure whether it is a dropbox issue like the other posters, but will once it finishes syncing if I really have to.

Robert

MTN_SSC

Same issue here Windows 7 64 Bit. All explorer folder icons to default and back. Could not restart or shut down because Start button kept collapsing on every flash.

Walter

Thanks for the updates @robertcz & @MTN_SSC!

I can see that the common denominator here seems to be Windows 7, the 64 bit version,yet, I'd like to also check if there's an antivirus, firewall or even a proxy/VPN setting that could be causing this so -at your earliest convenience- please let us know if there's any of the aforementioned software on the affected computers and if the issue persists when you (temporarily; merely for testing purposes) disable them.

Thanks so much for your patience and cooperation on this!

robertcz

Hi Walter, the only anti-virus I have is Windows Defender. But that has been there for years prior to this issue's recent occurrence. I do from time to time have to use a VPN thingy called F5 to access my workplace, but again I have been using this for quite a while. No firewall as far as I can tell. I hope that helps in diagnosis.

Robert

Gillrado

Is now happening to me as well and I am running windows 10. Will be great to follow this post and see the outcome.

Walter

Thanks for the report @Gillrado!

@robertcz :Thanks for letting me know this detail Robert - it's really helpful.

At this point, I'll need to ask all of you who are affected by this to re-install the desktop app on the problematic devices using the offline installer of our most recent, stable version found here:

https://www.dropbox.com/downloading?build=82.4.155&plat=win&type=full

Should the matter at hand persist, the next step would be a clean, advanced re-install as outlined here: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/advanced-reinstall

If you'd like account specific assistance with this, you can always log a ticket with our team through this page: https://www.dropbox.com/support

Let me know the results once you get the chance to follow my suggestions and we'll take it from there.

Gavriel

Unfortunately, this is happening to me too! All my icons on my desktop start "flashing" (turn white blank and then normal) when dropbox is syncing.

I have Windows 7 64bits with Microsoft Security Essentials.

Lusil

Hi there @Gavriel,

Thanks for nudging on this and sorry to hear that you're also having trouble with this.

As @Walter also recommends, could you confirm if you've tried temporarily disabling your antivirus and configured your firewall to work with your desktop app?

If you have, could you let us know if you're running the latest stable version of the desktop app (82.4.156) by hovering over your Dropbox icon on your system tray?

Let us know what you find!

MTN_SSC

Walter,

I have BitDefender Total Security which has antivirus protection and the firewall. I will try to temporarily disable the firewall next time I download multiple files to see if the condition persists.

fasterx

Windows 7 64bits with Microsoft Security Essentials

Same thing happened to me when indexing and syncing about 400k files. It was so bad that I had to force close dropbox.exe and explorer.exe because system was unusable. Icons were flickering, applications windows were overlaying each other or disappearing taskbar was not clickable at all.

When the sync finished everything got back to normal.

derKestrel

Same here, flickering all icons between default and correct icon even in the above linked current version under windows professional 64 bit while syncing. Stopped when syncing complete.

Note: Dropbox went to 100% CPU on 4 cores for the whole time

Nathan & Shelle

This kind of behavior has been happening for me for about a month and it is driving me insane. It's especially bad when in Dropbox managed folders, but generally File Explorer is just really laggy and difficult to use now.

Every time I touch a file in File Explorer, any visible Dropbox overlay icons all refresh and flicker 4-5 times times while my user input temporarily grinds to a halt. If I have task manager running, the GPU usage for the Dropbox process spikes as well as for processes called Desktop Window Manager and Client Server Runtime Process.

I am on Windows 10 Enterprise build 1809 with Dropbox 87.3.122 on a Dell Precision 5520 with 16GB of RAM. I have McAfee running against my will (corporate laptop) and cannot disable it.

Suggestions to reinstall Dropbox are not really helpful. I have 600GB of data in Dropbox Pro (currently about 100GB downloaded locally). It could take days/weeks to resync.

As much as I don't want to, I'm about to have to just uninstall Dropbox and see if that fixes the problem. Next step is to have my IT department re-image my laptop. Really a bummer.

Nathan & Shelle

Here's a screencap of what's going on, thought it might help your developers... the dropbox overlay icon checkmarks are constantly refreshing, causing File Explorer to lag severely -- my mouse is jittery and my movements are slow because the UI is seizing up every time those checkmarks refresh.

Lusil

Hey peeps, thanks for reports on this!

If you've already checked out @Walter's earlier post, could you also check if you've got the latest stable version of our desktop app installed?

You can do this by hovering over the Dropbox icon that's on your system tray or menu bar.

If you find that you have the beta version installed (which can be recognized from xx.3.xx):

Go to your General tab in your online Settings.
Uncheck the box next to "Include me in early releases" if it is checked.
Download and install the latest version of the desktop app.

Let me know if this helps!

DB_Is_Broken

I have the same problem. ALL of the desktop icons flash between what they are supposed to look like, and the blank - windows default, white icon - when windows can't find the icon file. This flashing stops once dropbox stops synching. But it will happen if I keep dropbox running and any files change and the app does its background synching.

The problem is definitely due to Dropbox. I do not have Dropbox set to startup when the computer boots. I activate it, and shut it down as needed. The problem only happens when dropbox runs.

As you can see, dropbox support is useless.

This issue has gotten worse over time, but it seems to be benign.

DB_Is_Broken

I have had other issues with syncing of mobile Apple devices, and Dropbox support has been useless about that issue as well.

Google Drive just works, and I am working to migrate over to that.

Lusil

Hey @DB_Is_Broken, thanks for nudging us on this thread and sorry to hear that you're having trouble with icons flashing when the desktop app is running.

As a first step, could you try a simple reinstallation of the desktop app? Maybe that will do the trick.

First, make sure that you save and quit all programs that access files in the Dropbox folder and stop the desktop app from running.

To do this, click on the Dropbox icon next to your computer's clock, select your avatar, go to "Quit Dropbox" from the drop-down menu.

Once you do that and if you're on a Mac OS:

Delete the Dropbox app from the Applications folder.
Reinstall the desktop app.

Open the Dropbox .dmg file and double click the Dropbox icon.
Dropbox should appear in your menu bar.

If you're on a Windows OS, instead:

Uninstall Dropbox.
Reboot your computer to make sure the uninstall is complete.
Download and install the newest version of the desktop app.

Let me know how it goes!

clevercrow1

Exactly the same as mine. Window 10 here.

Lusil

Hey @clevercrow1, thanks for checking in with us!

Could you please let me know if you've tried reinstalling the desktop app by any chance?

If you haven't, please have a look at my post above where I mention the exact steps to follow.

Let me know what you find!

robertcz

I have reinstalled a number of times. Given that I have close to a million file, this took well over a month. Not keen to do it again, as it is unlikely to help.

Robert

RonAZ1

Exactly the same problem I'm having and I also run Windows 7 (but mine is Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with Service Pack 1). I can't say for sure when it started but I think it is likely to have started with upgrade that gave me 2T of capacity. Seems like the local folder is trying to query the cloud too frequently or something. My entire file system seems unstable, with the flickering icons. My HDD indicator is always flashing. The fan speeds up and slows down. And, sometimes I COMPLETELY LOSE THE DRIVE THAT MY DROPBOX LOCAL FOLDER IS ON. It reappears and then disappears again. If I'm working on something it is very frustrating trying to make sure it is actually saving and then syncing (which it seems not to do unless I pause sync and restart sync). Rebooting doesn't help. The system seems stable during long period when it's syncing a bunch of files. This is really frustrating!!

UPDATE: I removed several folders from Selective Sync and it is completely quiet and stable while this is going on:

UPDATE #2: And now, it is going crazy again, starting when this appeared:

Dropbox Sync.jpg

What is going on with Dropbox???

RonAZ1

Yep, this is exactly the behavior mine is exhibiting...driving me absolutely insane!

Lusil

Hey peeps, thanks for nudging us on the thread.

@robertcz, since you've already given a reinstall a try - awesome work by the way - could you also check for me how many files you have in your Dropbox folder by right-clicking and selecting Properties?

If you find that you have more than 300,000 files, although this is a soft limit that greatly depends on the hardware specifications of the computer running the app, it can negatively affect the performance of the desktop app.

If you've checked that and you're still having trouble, try the steps in this article to see if they help.

Likewise, @RonAZ1, please try the same steps and let me know how it goes.

Keep me posted, everyone!