The Microsoft files on Windows 11 are prompting for a Dropbox sign in every time I try to open them.

Hey everyone, great news to report. The team has been hard at work and this issue should now be mitigated.

Please restart your Dropbox desktop app. 

We have the same problem started yesterday 01.09.2025 in our company.

We have dropbox teams.

every office file needs now about 5 seconds to open instead of 1 second. our programmers try to get rid of this dropbox behavoiur, nothing helps.... please fix this issue! every employee opens about 500 office documents per day.... it causes so much trouble that we discuss to change dropbox to another system

dropbox version 231.4.5770

Megan​ Nancy​ Jay​ ,

Over the weekend, my firm got me a new computer because my old one was having issues unrelated to this thread. I noticed that after I installed dropbox on this new machine, these pop-ups are no longer appearing. It asked me if I wanted to turn on co-authoring and I clicked "leave unlocked." I believe when this issue first began occurring, I had clicked a different option (can't remember which).

Is it possible that one of these options causes this pop-up to occur? If so, how can we choose one of these other options for co-authoring other than re-installing dropbox and making a different selection? 

Closing the pop-up allows you to get into the file, but it will appear every single time you open a file. 

What's even worse is that if you use document linkings (meaning you have a word doc pulling excel data into it from an excel file) the window will pop up for every single linking in that word doc. This means if you have a word doc pulling 20 links from an excel file, the pop-up will appear literally twenty times before you can open the word doc. And sometimes, it pops up BEHIND the word program, meaning you have to alt + tab to get to the pop-up so you can then close it. 

It literally takes me about 5 minutes to open some of the files we have at my firm and it's unbelievably frustrating. 

@Nancy, EvermoreUW​ is correct.   The popup appears every time you try to open an Office file, either from File Explorer or directly within the Office application.

I’m experiencing significant inconvenience as well. The same issue keeps recurring, and it's making me question whether we should continue using Dropbox at all. Starting today, our entire team has begun raising concerns about this issue. It's so extremely, extremely, extremely frustrating that we’re seriously considering switching to a different service if it’s not resolved immediately.

If I close the window prompting for the Dropbox login, I can then open the Excel file. I then I open another Excel file, the Dropbox login window appears once more.

This has been ongoing for a week, and several releases later has not been resolved.

Needs to be elevated/escalated.

Seems widespread was politely told 'we are working on it in chat support about 6 days ago.

Is there an actual case open?

Hi Nancy. 
I’m not sure what you mean by close the sign-in before accessing files. The login appears WHEN you open a file, and that’s the problem. You have to then close the sign-in window multiple times before the file opens. 
This, for me, is when accessing a file via Windows Explorer.  

if you mean completely logout of the Dropbox app, well that kind of defeats the point of having Dropbox…

Hey everyone! I just wanted to let you know that our team is still looking into the matter.

I can also see that some of you have already tried this workaround, but can you all please attempt to close the sign-in window first before accessing your files? Does it come back after that, or does this temporarily solve the issue?