"Start Dropbox on system startup", Windows 10

[mc04]

[Jay]

Hi there, this isn’t actually the Dropbox desktop application that you’re seeing in the task manager, which starts the syncing, but another process related to Dropbox.

Has this process affected your CPU time in any way? Any details you can provide would be helpful!

[mc04]

Yeah, I don't really care what it's doing, when I select 'don't run at startup' I expect it to not run at startup.

[Jay]

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll forward it to our dev team for their consideration to improve the app further!

[mc04]

I'd rate that as pretty unlikely; I've disovered since posting this that it's been doing this for literally years, as well as re-enabling itself and shoving itself into the autoruns. This is malware.

[Jay]

I’ve checked with our team on this matter for more clarification on what it does.

The Dropbox service simply needs to “be there” at startup (but won’t do anything) even when the actual app doesn’t start, so that the app can have all features and functionality available if it’s started manually later.

The service can be stopped, however, from the Windows Service Management Console, if needed, but this may or may not affect the app later on before a restart. 

I hope that this information helps!