Re: Windows 7 Event Viewer Error "Failed to connect to the driver: (-2147024894)"

I have now heard from Theo (Dropbox Support) who is still investigating.  I have told him that the problem has been noticed by other forum members and that a bug report has been submitted by one member.

I wondered at one time if a Windows update may have contributed to the problem but on looking back at my update records, this seems unlikely as there were no new Windows updates on my system between 12 October and 09 November..

We have the same problem here with 3 Windows 8.1 Dell laptops. All of them have a clean install of Win 8.1 after formatting the hard drive. We have tried installing Dropbox as the first piece of software after all drivers are configured and we have no success. There is exactly the same error in the event log as described: 'Failed to connect to the driver: (-2147024894) The system cannot find the file specified.' Here are the Event Log details:

Hi Roberto,

When reading your post I realised I had an earlier edition of Dropbox.exe so I installed the version you are using.  I do not experience the difficulties you are facing.  The initial problem 'Failed to connect to the driver: (-2147024894) The system cannot find the file specified.' is still there but, as before with the earlier version of Dropbox, Windows is able to recover the situation and Dropbox works normally for the rest of the session.  My operating system is Windows 7 SP1 Home Premium Edition running on a desktop computer.  With your Windows 8.1 laptops, you appear to have additional problems as Windows seems not to be recovering the situation.

As I find the Windows Event Viewer for Windows 7 a little muddly, I use an alternative calle 'My Event Viewer' which has a simpler user interface.  I have copied the relevant items the program lists on start-up as follows:

97284 Application Error 10/11/2016 17:39:04 DbxSvc 3 320 Chris-PC 0 212 Failed to connect to the driver: (-2147024894) The system cannot find the file specified.

97300 Application Information 10/11/2016 17:39:51 ESENT 3 300 Chris-PC 0 140 Windows (2120) Windows: The database engine is initiating recovery steps.

97301 Application Information 10/11/2016 17:39:51 ESENT 3 301 Chris-PC 0 272 Windows (2120) Windows: The database engine has begun replaying logfile C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\MSS.log.
 
97302 Application Information 10/11/2016 17:39:52 ESENT 3 302 Chris-PC 0 140 Windows (2120) Windows: The database engine has successfully completed recovery steps.

97285 Application Information 10/11/2016 17:39:04 DbxSvc 2 258 Chris-PC 0 96 Pipe server thread started.
 
97283 Application Information 10/11/2016 17:39:04 DbxSvc 1 256 Chris-PC 0 96 Service started.

97303 Application Information 10/11/2016 17:39:53 Windows Search Service 1 1003 Chris-PC 0 132 The Windows Search Service started.

You will see in item 97300 that the database engine is initiating recovery steps and those steps are completed in item 97302.  In item 97285 0 96 Pipe server thread is started and in 97283 the 0 96 Service (DbxSvc) is started.  These items are listed in the sequence they appear although I have left out non-related information items.  Do you get any similar items in your Event Viewer after the initial error report (item 97284 in my list)?  Has Dropbox been set to start on system startup in the 'General' tab of 'Preferences'?  Have you previously had Dropbox working on the laptops before the bug appeared towards the end of October or is this a new installation after that time?  Hopefully one of the experts who visit this forum will be able to help you get Dropbox up and running even if the bug shown by the Event Viewer persists for a while.

Just an idea...

Same here on my machine running Win 10 Pro and SSD.

After running CCleaner the program showed this registry entry:

ActiveX/COM Fehler  InProcServer32\C:\Program Files (x86)\Dropbox\Update\1.3.51.1\psmachine.dll HKCR\CLSID\{A4E4530A-938F-48EA-887D-FDF5DD769CB0}

This path ...\1.3.51.1\... seems to be incorrect - shouldn't it be ...\1.3.57.1\...? Any ideas?

Greetings from Austria

I see the same thing:

ActiveX/COM Issue InProcServer32\C:\Program Files (x86)\Dropbox\Update\1.3.27.37\psmachine.dll HKCR\CLSID\{88C53488-F54D-4BA3-AFAC-49E28CD76A8A}
ActiveX/COM Issue InProcServer32\C:\Program Files (x86)\Dropbox\Update\1.3.51.1\psmachine.dll HKCR\CLSID\{A4E4530A-938F-48EA-887D-FDF5DD769CB0}

Hi,

I've checked my Dropbox Update folder which is 1.3.57.1 so the registry reference to 1.3.51.1 certainly appears odd.

Theo, the Dropbox Support contact has passed my queries on to a colleague, Benjamin, who suggested that security programs may be causing the problem.  I disabled anti-virus and reinstalled Dropbox but the issue remained even before I re-enabled the anti-virus program.  I suggested Benjamin looks at this thread as I believe the experiences of other forum members posting here may give a broader insight into the nature of the problem.

I'm having the exact same problem on Windows 10 (anniversary update). It's definitely a bug, reproducible every single time on various systems and it started appearing out of nowhere after a specific Dropbox version update.

The error seems to be gone...

After several restarts no more error - at least on my machine!

I tried to repair/reinstall by running the following file manually as an administrator:

Folder 1.3.57.1 - DropboxUpdateHelper (Windows Installer) as admin

Once I got an error message that "psmachine.dll"  cannot be found (Click OK, Ignore, etc.) - e voila!

I'll keep an eye on it...

Greetings from Vienna

Hi pbuco,

I tried your suggestion but unfortunately it did not work for me. I got no error message ' error message that "psmachine.dll"  cannot be found'.  I tried both the 'Repair' and the 'Install' option for the 'DropboxUpdateHelper' but no luck.

Too good to be true and shame on me!

After repair/reinstall I found DbxSvc set to "manual" in Services - don't ask why... Switched back to "automatic" the error was back. :sob:

Waiting for an update and good night from Vienna

I am having the same issue

- System

  - Provider

   [ Name]  DbxSvc 
  - EventID 320

   [ Qualifiers]  49154 
   Level 2 
   Task 3 
  - TimeCreated

   [ SystemTime]  2016-11-11T21:16:33.000000000Z
 
   EventRecordID 27779 
 

- EventData

   (-2147024894) The system cannot find the file specified. 

Hi all,

Benjamin (Dropbox Technical Support) has emailed me with a suggestion that the problem may be with my user account.  He recommends that I set up an additional account with Administrator rights and install another copy of Dropbox on it to see if that also has the problem.  I cannot believe that the issue is anything to to with my user account - this belief is reinforced by the growing number of fellow Dropbox users reporting identical problems in this thread.  Surely we don't all have corrupted user accounts.  As my system resources would become a bit stretched, I am not keen to create another user account if it is not really necessary.

I have asked him again to look at this thread with particular reference to the post by pbuco and orion44 about the apparent mismatch between the update folder path in the registry entry and the folder path in 'C:\Program Files'.

Hi orion44,

The first of your two new errors in your latest post appears to be the originally reported error (EventID 320).  The second (EventID 270) has not appeared on my system as yet.  Is this second error on your system persistent in the sense it appears at each start of your system or did it appear just once?  If it appears repeatedly, does Windows recover the situation as it does with the original error and allow you to use Dropbox normally?

The new errors were triggered when I opened Dropbox, not sure which specific behavior did it.  Only the original error is appearing at every boot.

Hi orion44,

That sounds like like a temporary glitch during startup when a background service takes longer than usual open because of other system activity - for example I find that sometimes, by chance, my Firewall runs an update during startup (its updates only happen at irregular intervals and not necessarily at startup) and this seems to limit the resources available for the regular startup items causing a possible timeout for something that cannot load within its normal time span.

Regular monitoring of the Event Viewer can make one neurotic as errors and warnings show up - ignoring the Event Viewer leaves us none the wiser as usually Windows sorts the problems.  Without my neurosis I probably would be blissfully unaware of this Dropbox bug :sleeping:

Hi there, in our case we were recycling the 3 laptops, hard drive format, reinstallation of Windows, followed by installation of Dropbox. On one laptop we tried installing Dropbox before any other software to avoid potential conflicts, this did not help. This all took place last week (week commencing 7th Nov 2016).

The Event Log always shows 3 messages from DbxSvc service - "Service Started", "Failed to connect to the driver: (-2147024894) The system cannot find the file specified. " and "Pipe server thread started." DbxSvc.exe shows as running in Task Manager. Dropbox.exe does not show as running. I go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Dropbox\Client and double click on Dropbox.exe, it runs for a short time in Task Manager and then disappears. There are no messages in Event Log relating to Dropbox.exe.

I have manually run the file "C:\Program Files (x86)\Dropbox\Update\1.3.57.1\DropboxUpdateHelper.msi" as an Administrator - no change to anything.

I analysed the registry and found the same problems as mentioned above, I fixed the path to be 1.3.57.1 and restarted the DbxSvc service, re-ran Dropbox.exe, Dropbox still disappears after a couple of seconds.

I looked in C:\Users\XXX\AppData\Local\Dropbox\logs\1-crash-reports\Dropbox-win-14.4.19\ and I can see a dump file for every time I run Dropbox.exe. If somebody tells me where to send them, I can do that.

I have tried logging out the user, logging back in after making the above changes, same happens. I will go and try installing Dropbox on another Admin account now, although I´m already logged in with an admin account.

Dear all,

feeding up my personal WEV neurosis, I recently updated to version 14.4.19.

ID 320 still appears!

Installation log

Greetings

OK, bizarrely, I logged out and logged back in again with a local Administrator account (not a Microsoft Account) and installed Dropbox again from there, and this time it worked! I logged out and logged back into the original Administrator account with which I´d had problems, and Dropbox is working there too! No idea why, but there it is. Will try on the other 2 laptops now...

Hi Roberto,

Now you  have Dropbox working (at least on one of your laptops),  do you still get an error in the Event Viewer on startup followed by Windows recovering the situation and allowing the Dropbox service to run?   If you get no error, it looks like you've solved the situation and perhaps pbuco and I will get over our Event Viewer neurosis :relieved: and others who have posted on this thread will get some relief too.

What a shame nobody from Dropbox has, as yet, come forward with any suggestions.

Hi roberto,

and thx for the information! I updated out of the Win 10 Dropbox App using a Microsoft Account...

Gonna try your proceding.

Keeping you in the loop

Unfortunately installing Dropbox in a new administrator user account did not eradicate the Event Viewer error on startup although, as previously, the Dropbox program works correctly afterwards.  Perhaps roberto's problem with Dropbox was additional to the Event Viewer error - perhaps roberto could clarify if his fix has cleared the Event Viewer problem for him as well.

Same here too - didn't work.

Gonna have a visit at S. Freud's Museum next we... :wink: 

Must be handy for you pbuco living in Vienna.  Here in the UK we just bash our heads against the wall for a little light relief (can't get the treatment through the National health Service though). :grimacing:   Oh well, let's see what develops.