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Garret W.'s avatar
Garret W.
Helpful | Level 5
10 years ago
Solved

Truly stop Dropbox client from starting automatically on Windows 10.

This is happening to me on Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. When I first installed Dropbox 3.14.7 I thought it it was well-behaved, because it offered an option to disabled "Start Dropbox on system startup". But that doesn't work.

I have certain drives that aren't mounted when the system starts. I have moved the Dropbox configuration files (via an NTFS symbolic link) to that drive, but I make sure that I mount the drive before starting the Dropbox desktop application. I have disabled "Start Dropbox on system startup".

Yet still when I boot Windows 10, Dropbox throws up a dialog informing me that it has failed to start. *I had told it not to start automatically! Of course it will have a problem---I haven't mounted its settings drive yet. *But I told it not to start!*

If Dropbox has a "Start Dropbox on system startup" option, it should honor that options. Don't control my system while pretending to give me options to disable the software. Please tell me how to *really* stop Dropbox from starting automatically, even the secret whatever-it-does-to muck-around-with-my-system, or I am removing the software from my computer. Thanks.

  • To truly prevent Dropbox from changing the autoplay settings (in Windows 10):

     

    1. Close Dropbox;
    2. Open Regedit and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AutoplayHandlers;
    3. Search for EVERY key with written "Dropbox autoplay" and replace this with either "MSOpenFolder" or "MSPromptEachTime" depending on your preferences;
    4. Restart the PC.

     

    Right now it is working for me, but as always YMMV!

     

     

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