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Dropboxcleanup.exe has stopped working - Windows 8.1
I get the popup error message "Dropboxcleanup.exe has stopped working" about once every hour. This has been happening in the last 12 hours so I assume there's been a recent update. I'm on 168.4.4802....
FINALLY, someone talking good sense. Thank you Jeremy - this is what is happening to me as well - I even downloaded the missing .dll from the internet and put it in that C:\Users\myuserid\AppData\Roaming\Dropbox\bin\169.4.5684 folder and I still get the message every hour or so. I'm completely at my wit's end and am days away from finding another solution to my cloud storage needs. I'm not super computer-savvy and so tried all the "solutions" presented here and nothing worked. I've since undone them all (I only wish I could get the time it took to do 6 uninstalls/re-installs back) because none made any difference. If the whole issue stems from missing that one .dll file, any idea why downloading and extracting it to that folder referenced above didn't stop the error? FYI - I'm using Windows 10 Pro and getting this error, so it's not unique to 7 and 8....
I mentioned above that when I searched my system for instances of one of the DLLs I found several (not just in the Dropbox \bin folder), and that although the ones I found all had the same name, they had slightly different contents. In fact they had different "hashes" (a sort of fingerprint of the contents) and different sizes. I said that was ok; the reason I think that's so is that I think they'd been compiled on different dates, or perhaps released by Microsoft after there's been Windows Updates applied to the code that they are created from.
(DLLs are standard sets of 'functions' which many programs need to call, packaged up separately so that each program doesn't have to have its own copy of those permanently inside it. The "api-ms-win-core-heap-l2-1-0.dll" one I'd /guess/ is used for "heap" management - which is to do with how a program grabs, uses, and later frees up lots of small amounts of memory, which are sort of conceptually in a heap somewhere; the "api-ms-win-core-registry-l1-1-0.dll" one is presumably for access to the registry.
These specific DLLs might be part of the Microsoft .Net programming frameworks ... of which there's several. As well as a first DLL not being able to be found and loaded, maybe there's a wider issue - perhaps Dropbox expect us all to have a newer version of .NET installed, perhaps something that uptodate instances of Win 10 / 11 have but only some W8[.1]/W7 systems have. Maybe there's a whole set of DLLs etc that the code would need to load and we're only hearing of the first failure - because after one failure there's no point in the code continuing to try to load others.)
Anyway, the first problem if you find a version of the same-named DLL somewhere on the internet and download it is - it might not be the exact version that the Dropbox application expects to see. Once a DLL has been loaded I'd /guess/ that the program that asked it to be loaded can eg check its loaded length, and (certainly) check what routines it contains. Maybe one of those checks means the version you found wasn't in some sense acceptable.
It's also extremely unsafe to grab copies of DLLs from arbitary websites - you've no idea if the code within them has been modified to do anything malicious.
It's possible that Dropbox know the exact hash/fingerprint of the version they expect to have loaded and check that ... and the one(s) you've tried aren't the one that Dropbox should have shipped.
Another possibility is that /some/ DLLs need to be registered (not that I know exactly what that does). Installers issue the command that does that as well as placing the DLL(s) in whatever location is required. I hesitate to suggest that you issue the same command because I don't know if there's a downside to doing so.
