Orange box icon meaning

Hey mhuppertz, can you try these steps here, to see if they help?

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 Hi can anyone help me, the  file with this box icon fails to open   

Hey 1775468, thanks for reaching out to the Dropbox Community.

The icons on your files are not really Dropbox icons, but they come from OneDrive.

Can you try to disable OneDrive and let us know if that helps?

I've been struggling with these orange boxes for months.  Per this thread, I uninstalled OneDrive and restarted my computer.  Problem persisted.  If I copy a folder to my laptop, the icon disappears from any file in the foldere.  If I put the folder back into Dropbox, the icon reappears and causes me to get an error message when trying to open the file.  What next?

Hey Kevin-54 - sorry to hear you're having issues with this.

This orange box icon comes from One Drive not Dropbox. Are you 100% sure you completely removed it from your computer?

Let us know more and we'll take it from there. 

If the dropbox logo is in the bottom right corner near the time (Windows) right click it, then when the pop up comes up click on your initials in the top right corner, a drop down box will open and click on preferences.  A new window will pop up for dropbox preferences, click on the sync tab.  There is a section that says "save hard drive space automatically" yes or no.  I had no checked, which is what you want, but then there is a drop down selection to the right that allows you to choose "available offline" or "online-only" choose available offline.  I had online-only selected and as soon as I switched it to available offline all the little boxes went away.

Definitely uninstalled OneDrive - I double checked this morning.

Thanks for the suggestions regarding checking my sync options but the options you mentioned do not show up in the drop down menu.  I did check to see if any files were set to 'selective sync' and none were.

Could you also send us a full page screenshot of where you're spotting the icon Kevin-54? 

 Over a 4-6 week period I spent about 30 hours on the phone and sent about a dozen screen captures to a string of Dropbox support staff, each of whom escalated the problem to someone new, resulting in me having to start over explaining the problem.  In the end, I was told it was a problem with an 'an extension' or OneDrive and they couldn't help - they refused to proceed further.

1. the box icon does not necessarily appear on every file, in some folders it might just be on one or two, in others, like the one above it is on every file
2. I only see the icon when I attempt to open files in Explorer
3. If I go open Dropbox online, I can see and open the files except I need to download them to work on them so it is not a viable option
4. If I pull the folder out of Dropbox and put it on my Desktop, the problem disappears
5. If I put the folder back in Dropbox, the problem reappears, though it might be better or worse than it was originally
6. Last night I shared a folder with my brother - he saw no orange boxes and had no trouble opening the files
7. Clearly, the problem has to do with something on my laptop interfering with Dropbox - that is why I uninstalled OneDrive - unfortunately that wasn't the problem. 

Hey Kevin-54, sorry to hear about your experience.

Can you please send me your last escalated ticket, so I can take a look?