Double-clicking on cloud files produces error message

[JasonW-work]

Hi, I work in IT support and one of our clients has an issue with his Dropbox on one of his machines - on his home machine it works fine but he has a machine on a building site with a 4G connection which is the one that produces the error. Periodically he'll click on a cloud-only file and get an error message such as "There was an error opening this document. The file cannot be accessed by the system" or "Word was unable to read this document. It may be corrupt" - it's as if Windows tries to open the file before Dropbox downloads it. My theory is that it is due to the type of connection (given that the home machine is fine) but it's a pretty fast connection - when files are marked as available offline they download immediately and open without problems (I've suggested this as a workaround but our client isn't very patient and wants to double-click like he does at home!), also it's an intermittent fault so sometimes double-clicking works and sometimes it doesn't.

We've tried uninstalling and reinstalling, renaming and resyncing the directory and have also contacted Dropbox support who weren't particularly helpful unfortunately. The machine is running Windows 10 Home (10.0.19045) and the Dropbox version is 173.4.6706 which I believe is the latest version.

[Walter]

Hi there @JasonW-work, sorry to hear about this and thanks for all the information you've shared with us.

Could you clarify the size of the files that are giving you such errors and if your client is making sure that the desktop app is 'up to date' and not still syncing in their system tray when they try to open the files on their computer? 

If you could also share your ticket ID with us, we'd be able to look it up in our system as well.

Thanks!