Installation Failed error on the Dropbox desktop app

When I was Installation on my PC (windows 7) i'm getting notification "Installation failed. the dropbox installer failed to start".

I had an issue where Dropbox (2TB plan) was stuck on "Connecting" and never progressed from there.  In desperation, I uninstalled and reinstalled afresh but the installation failed with "The installer did not complete.  Installation has been aborted".  A link is provided to "Show me help for this issue", but it's pretty unhelpful and completely unspecific to the issue.

I then performed an uninstall with Revo followed by a scan-and-nuke, and then tried again but same result.

I despair sometimes. "The installer did not complete.  Installation has been aborted" tells me that the installer returns a boolean value -i.e. It worked/It failed, with no better granularity than that.  An error code/stack trace/log file would be nice.  Getting the code finished in a hurry seems to have taken precedence over helping customers with problems.

Where do I go from here?

Thanks for letting us know about this, rossmcm.

Do you perhaps have any security apps like an antivirus, VPN, firewall etc. installed on the computer, that might be affecting the Dropbox app?

If so, try to temporarily disable them, to see if that helps.

Keep me posted.

Hello,

I have the same issue. I turned off my firewalls/anti-virus, etc, and still get the error, "The dropbox installer failed to start". Now, this is my own fault for being dumb and trying to uninstall dropbox. I attempted to go through my control panel/task manager but no matter how many times I ended the task, it came back up and so the uninstallation wouldn't work-- I got impatient and tried to manually delete the program. The error looks like this:

I can't see the app in my settings: apps, it's not listed as a program. Not sure how to fix this blunder of mine!

I've tried the regular and offline installer, both generate the same error.

Hi Trella, have you tried the advanced reinstallation steps to see if you're able to uninstall the program fully?

Good morning Jay,

I fixed it! I deleted some system registry values and that cleared things up. There was another thread in the Dropbox community that had instructions for this.

Thank you!

We're glad to hear it's sorted now and thanks for keeping us in the loop too Trella - most appreciated.

Could you maybe link the thread you mentioned for future reference as it might help other users too? 

Sure thing!

It is this one:

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Apps-and-Installations/quot-The-Dropbox-installer-failed-to-start-quot/m-p/197775

Cheers,

-Trella

Thanks so much for this Trella 

Take care and see you around the Community!