Why does Dropbox keep messing with my desktop shortcut? (Win 10)

[Paul_Blitz]

If I create a desktop shortcut to, say, "C:\Users\Paul\Dropbox\Work stuff\", then it stays like that, and it works the way I want: I click on it, and it QUICKLY opens the local folder (which is actually one of my dropbox sub folders)

If instead, I create a link to "C:\Users\Paul\Dropbox\" then initially it works fine, and as above it QUICKLY opens up the dropbox root folder.

However, after a while (I'm thinking it may include a logout / login, so dropbox gets started up again) it changes that link to be {"C:\Program Files (x86)\Dropbox\Client\Dropbox.exe" /home}.... which is very SLOW to open!

I did NOT ask it to make that change!

Any ideas what's happening?

[Rich · Accepted solution]

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@Paul_Blitz wrote:

However, after a while (I'm thinking it may include a logout / login, so dropbox gets started up again) it changes that link to be {"C:\Program Files (x86)\Dropbox\Client\Dropbox.exe" /home}.... which is very SLOW to open!

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Don't call the shortcut Dropbox. Call it My Dropbox or something else and it will  be left alone. Dropbox will always update the desktop shortcut called Dropbox. It gets changed to what it originally was, which is meant to launch the Dropbox application if it's not already running, and then open the Dropbox folder.

[Paul_Blitz]

Ah, another of those "well documented features" eh? Thank you, that makes sense, and your solution works nicely!

[semioniy]

I find it very annoying, so here's what I did:
re-created original shortcut, made it read-only, opened its properties and on Security tab denied all listed users (+ group "Everyone") rights to write to this file. If Dropbox finds a way to work around this, I'm gonna be more concerned about windows security, than about my dropbox folder shortcut 😁