Some Dropbox folders in Windows Explorer take minutes to refresh

[Terry H.10]

Let me give you an example of what's happening: I am in a Windows Explorer folder that is synced with Dropbox. I click to re-order the items in the folder (e.g. sort by date, sort by duration of music file, etc.) The green progress bar begins and it can take 30 seconds or 2 minutes or 5 minutes to complete. In other words, folder changes or refreshes can take a very long time. This only happens in folders within the Dropbox part of my folder structure, and it appears to be much worse in some sub-folders. I recall contacting Dropbox support a year or two ago (because I have had this for a long time) and they told me to follow a complex process (including registry edits if I recall correctly) to uninstall and reinstall Dropbox and clean up my file structure. It sounded like there was a corruption somewhere. Clearly I didn't want to do this because it's a huge hassle to reinstall and then resync hundreds of thousands of files. Has anyone else seen this problem, and is there a way of fixing it?

[Terry H.10]

Thanks for the explanation. I still have a question!

When I look at my file structure it is

C: > Users > Terry > Dropbox > [all the folders I use with Dropbox]

(I believe that was the default location when I first installed Dropbox on the PC)

So when I uninstall the Dropbox app, I assume it doesn't change that structure, i.e. that Dropbox folder will still be there, in the same place, it just won't sync.

If that's the case, when I reinstall Dropbox, how does Dropbox know that folder is there, so it can re-sync to it? Do I have to set that up during the install, or is it automatic in the sense that I used the default location when I first installed Dropbox?

Terry 

[Jay]

The files would remain on your computer, and the Dropbox folder wouldn't be syncing while the app is uninstalled and unlinked.

When you reinstall, since it's the default location, the Dropbox desktop application would detect it and sync changes.