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Forum Discussion
Dropbox freezes and crashes my file explorer.
Hello,
I am having trouble with dropbox working through my Windows file explorer. For some reason, within the last week every time I try to navigate to one of my dropbox files the file explorer cr...
Megan
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorHey grossdpg, thanks for all the details, much appreciated!
What makes me a bit skeptical here is the fact that the same behavior is present when you quit the app.
If our app had something to do with it then the moment you quit it, the File Explorer would resume, wouldn't be as slow and work as expected.
However, this doesn't seem to be the case here. Have you made sure that this doesn't have anything to do with the device's RAM or a Windows issue?
Also, as the next step, you can try out these steps on your desktop app, and let me know if they help.
Fair. So that indicates it's not something about the running app itself. Though it could still be related to the install.
One more curious clue: my Dropbox directory sits in my Windows user directory (C:/Users/USERNAME). When I select individual objects (folders) here in Windows Explorer one by one (using arrow keys), it selects each object smoothly/promptly *until it gets to the Dropbox folder*, where it's slow to select, and then slow to unselect when I down arrow again to select the next object--but after that goes smoothly again. That produces the same lag I've been seeing inside the Dropbox directory.
A second one: if I do the same thing in this same user folder from another local account (the admin account, from which I can access the user account directory due to admin account privileges), the issue doesn't reproduce. In other worse, only occurs inside the user account.
It might be (or probably is) a Windows issue, but it seems like there's some bad interaction with Dropbox.
To try to hunt down the culprit I've done more things, like stopping the Windows Search service and all indexing, which can slow things down, and quitting/stopping other running apps and services. Nothing there. I then downloaded Windows Process Monitor and started logging operations as I scroll-select inside vs. outside of the Dropbox directory. I may have gotten a little closer to a culprit: I'm seeing a ton of CreateFile and CloseFile operations being executed on files/paths in my Dropbox by Explorer.exe when I reproduce the behavior. The paths I've noticed these operations are executing on so far are all files I had previously marked as online-only via the Dropbox context menu (when Dropbox was running), or the folders containing them. I'm not sure this is universally the case though.
I'll try making all files available offline and see if the lag goes away.
Thanks Walter.
Ultimately that didn't do it. The most I can discern is that whenever I even so much as select the root Dropbox directory (while navigating its parent directory), the process monitor indicates a ton of file system activities are engaging recursively through the entire Dropbox directory and everything within it, down the file tree. Essentially, when just the root directory is selected by left-click, Explorer.exe is running a CreateFile operation and a QueryDirectory operation, a QueryRemoteProtocolInformation operation, and a CloseFile operation (and maybe some others) for every file and folder under it. The intermediate operations (QueryDirectory and QueryRemoteProtocolInformation) seem to be outliers--they're only called on Dropbox paths, not on any other path. Each of these takes microseconds individually but because there's a million or whatnot operations taking place recursively through my entire Dropbox (with ~100K files and ~6K folders) it seems to slow the whole thing down.
It is strange. But it seems like an interaction of the Dropbox install with Windows itself. Maybe some network setting. I'm not really sure where to take it from here--I can ask ChatGPT what these operations mean/do but I'm pretty at a loss for whether this is the issue, whether and how it can be safely changed, and how to make it stop.
As is Dropbox is painful to use, and I'm forced to think about alternatives.
Thanks for your help.
