all 'FILE EXPLORER' FILE icons flashing whenever dropbox is running

[alan78]

As of today drop box is causing the file icons in ANY/ALL open explorer windows to flash constantly between the correct icon image and the default windows 'no icon' icon.

if i KILL the dropbox process magically all the icon switching stops, thi sis constant and doesnt seem to stop!

What can i do?

I also seem to have 3 DropBoxThumnbailGenerator.exe processes running?

Thanks

[Walter]

Thanks for the updates @robertcz & @MTN_SSC!

I can see that the common denominator here seems to be Windows 7, the 64 bit version,yet, I'd like to also check if there's an antivirus, firewall or even a proxy/VPN setting that could be causing this so -at your earliest convenience- please let us know if there's any of the aforementioned software on the affected computers and if the issue persists when you (temporarily; merely for testing purposes) disable them.

Thanks so much for your patience and cooperation on this!

[robertcz]

Hi Walter, the only anti-virus I have is Windows Defender. But that has been there for years prior to this issue's recent occurrence. I do from time to time have to use a VPN thingy called F5 to access my workplace, but again I have been using this for quite a while. No firewall as far as I can tell. I hope that helps in diagnosis.

Robert

[Gillrado]

Is now happening to me as well and I am running windows 10. Will be great to follow this post and see the outcome.

[Walter]

Thanks for the report @Gillrado!

@robertcz :Thanks for letting me know this detail Robert - it's really helpful.

At this point, I'll need to ask all of you who are affected by this to re-install the desktop app on the problematic devices using the offline installer of our most recent, stable version found here: 

https://www.dropbox.com/downloading?build=82.4.155&plat=win&type=full 

Should the matter at hand persist, the next step would be a clean, advanced re-install as outlined here: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/advanced-reinstall 

If you'd like account specific assistance with this, you can always log a ticket with our team through this page: https://www.dropbox.com/support 

Let me know the results once you get the chance to follow my suggestions and we'll take it from there.

[Gavriel]

Unfortunately, this is happening to me too! All my icons on my desktop start "flashing" (turn white blank and then normal) when dropbox is syncing. 

I have Windows 7 64bits with Microsoft Security Essentials.

[Lusil]

Hi there @Gavriel, 

Thanks for nudging on this and sorry to hear that you're also having trouble with this. 

As @Walter also recommends, could you confirm if you've tried temporarily disabling your antivirus and configured your firewall to work with your desktop app?

If you have, could you let us know if you're running the latest stable version of the desktop app (82.4.156) by hovering over your Dropbox icon on your system tray?

Let us know what you find!

[MTN_SSC]

Walter,

I have BitDefender Total Security which has antivirus protection and the firewall. I will try to temporarily disable the firewall next time I download multiple files to see if the condition persists.

[fasterx]

Windows 7 64bits with Microsoft Security Essentials

Same thing happened to me when indexing and syncing about 400k files. It was so bad that I had to force close dropbox.exe and explorer.exe because system was unusable. Icons were flickering, applications windows were overlaying each other or disappearing taskbar was not clickable at all.

When the sync finished everything got back to normal.

[derKestrel]

Same here, flickering all icons between default and correct icon even in the above linked current version under windows professional 64 bit while syncing. Stopped when syncing complete.

Note: Dropbox went to 100% CPU on 4 cores for the whole time

[Nathan & Shelle]

This kind of behavior has been happening for me for about a month and it is driving me insane.  It's especially bad when in Dropbox managed folders, but generally File Explorer is just really laggy and difficult to use now. 

Every time I touch a file in File Explorer, any visible Dropbox overlay icons all refresh and flicker 4-5 times times while my user input temporarily grinds to a halt. If I have task manager running, the GPU usage for the Dropbox process spikes as well as for processes called Desktop Window Manager and Client Server Runtime Process.

I am on Windows 10 Enterprise build 1809 with Dropbox 87.3.122 on a Dell Precision 5520 with 16GB of RAM. I have McAfee running against my will (corporate laptop) and cannot disable it.  

Suggestions to reinstall Dropbox are not really helpful. I have 600GB of data in Dropbox Pro (currently about 100GB downloaded locally). It could take days/weeks to resync.

As much as I don't want to, I'm about to have to just uninstall Dropbox and see if that fixes the problem. Next step is to have my IT department re-image my laptop.  Really a bummer.