Dropbox freezes and crashes my file explorer.

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.