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Forum Discussion
Dropbox stuck on "Starting..." on Windows Server 2016
We have a Dropbox installed on a Windows Server 2016. In every accounts, when starting it, a popup displays "Your computer is currently offline. Please check your network settings". When putting the mouse cursor over the icon in the icon area, it displays "Connecting...". And when clicking on it, it's displayed "Starting...". Even after hours, Dropbox never completes its startup.
Dropbox was uninstalled/reinstalled, I manually cleaned it following another help page. I installed full stable versions from ~v150 to the beta v200, same error. The network works fine, I can open dropbox.com in the browser and log in. I tried to install Dropbox on another VM with Windows 7 running on the same WMware host, it worked immediately. I really tried everything following the many pages on the subject that I found, but nothing worked.
We have another Windows Server 2016 with multiple users with Drobox installed and didn't have those issues on it. I'd like to know if there is a way to trace what Dropbox sees (does it see the network at all?) or the path that it tries to follows, where it's blocked. I tested and dropbox.com ports and 443 connects normally by making a test with telnet from the host.
The present version installed is now the stable version Dropbox 198.4.7615 Offline Installer.x64.exe.
Any help would be appreciated.
- Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Thanks for reaching out to the Dropbox Community, AZI_doum.
To be honest, Windows Server operating systems are not a supported environment for the Dropbox application.
However, let's see if there's something we can find.
Was the Dropbox application working as expected before or is this the first time you're trying to use Dropbox on that computer?
And do you have any security software that could be interfering?
Let us know.
Hi, thanks for your reply. I know it's not supported on Windows Server, but up to last year, it was working fine on this one. It also still works very well on a freshly installed version of 2016 on another server. As a fact, it's only drawback is the space used on a server when all users have their own instance running. We have to keep the files online. Other then that, Dropbox runs A-1 for everybody on the server, with rare issues usually relatively easy to fix.
Yes, I tested with the security solution disabled and the issue occurred anyway. I then restarted it and added Dropbox.exe and DropboxUpdate.exe in it's exceptions.
I checked in the event viewer and saw nothing special that seemed related to Dropbox. I tried also to disable syncs because the app eventually offered to do it, but there is no connexion made yet anyway, and it didn't work either.
Is there any way to trace what it tries to reach, like we can do for Outlook for example?
