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Forum Discussion
alan78
7 years agoNew member | Level 2
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 proc...
Gavriel
7 years agoHelpful | Level 6
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
Dropbox Staff
7 years agoHi 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!
- fasterx7 years agoNew member | Level 2
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.
- derKestrel7 years agoNew member | Level 2
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 & Shelle7 years agoHelpful | Level 7
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.
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