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Dropboxcleanup.exe has stopped working - Windows 8.1
I get the popup error message "Dropboxcleanup.exe has stopped working" about once every hour. This has been happening in the last 12 hours so I assume there's been a recent update. I'm on 168.4.4802....
FINALLY, someone talking good sense. Thank you Jeremy - this is what is happening to me as well - I even downloaded the missing .dll from the internet and put it in that C:\Users\myuserid\AppData\Roaming\Dropbox\bin\169.4.5684 folder and I still get the message every hour or so. I'm completely at my wit's end and am days away from finding another solution to my cloud storage needs. I'm not super computer-savvy and so tried all the "solutions" presented here and nothing worked. I've since undone them all (I only wish I could get the time it took to do 6 uninstalls/re-installs back) because none made any difference. If the whole issue stems from missing that one .dll file, any idea why downloading and extracting it to that folder referenced above didn't stop the error? FYI - I'm using Windows 10 Pro and getting this error, so it's not unique to 7 and 8....
I mentioned above that when I searched my system for instances of one of the DLLs I found several (not just in the Dropbox \bin folder), and that although the ones I found all had the same name, they had slightly different contents. In fact they had different "hashes" (a sort of fingerprint of the contents) and different sizes. I said that was ok; the reason I think that's so is that I think they'd been compiled on different dates, or perhaps released by Microsoft after there's been Windows Updates applied to the code that they are created from.
(DLLs are standard sets of 'functions' which many programs need to call, packaged up separately so that each program doesn't have to have its own copy of those permanently inside it. The "api-ms-win-core-heap-l2-1-0.dll" one I'd /guess/ is used for "heap" management - which is to do with how a program grabs, uses, and later frees up lots of small amounts of memory, which are sort of conceptually in a heap somewhere; the "api-ms-win-core-registry-l1-1-0.dll" one is presumably for access to the registry.
These specific DLLs might be part of the Microsoft .Net programming frameworks ... of which there's several. As well as a first DLL not being able to be found and loaded, maybe there's a wider issue - perhaps Dropbox expect us all to have a newer version of .NET installed, perhaps something that uptodate instances of Win 10 / 11 have but only some W8[.1]/W7 systems have. Maybe there's a whole set of DLLs etc that the code would need to load and we're only hearing of the first failure - because after one failure there's no point in the code continuing to try to load others.)
Anyway, the first problem if you find a version of the same-named DLL somewhere on the internet and download it is - it might not be the exact version that the Dropbox application expects to see. Once a DLL has been loaded I'd /guess/ that the program that asked it to be loaded can eg check its loaded length, and (certainly) check what routines it contains. Maybe one of those checks means the version you found wasn't in some sense acceptable.
It's also extremely unsafe to grab copies of DLLs from arbitary websites - you've no idea if the code within them has been modified to do anything malicious.
It's possible that Dropbox know the exact hash/fingerprint of the version they expect to have loaded and check that ... and the one(s) you've tried aren't the one that Dropbox should have shipped.
Another possibility is that /some/ DLLs need to be registered (not that I know exactly what that does). Installers issue the command that does that as well as placing the DLL(s) in whatever location is required. I hesitate to suggest that you issue the same command because I don't know if there's a downside to doing so.
Thanks so much for this information, I'm learning a lot reading your posts. Seeing as it did nothing to stop the error messages, I'm going to delete that .dll I downloaded.
Looks like there's really nothing left that I can do except uninstall the program and use One Drive or something like that. I can't deal with these popping up every hour or so when I'm in the middle of doing work. Thanks again.
I suppose what's best depends on whether or not Dropbox support finally address the problem /properly/.
In the short term, if we assume that the scheduled tasks that get run have to continue running (I mean, you don't want Dropbox to stop applying updates to itself) then deleting the scheduled tasks is not sensible. You could possibly change them though so that they don't run during your normal working hours.
One of them only runs once per day (but it's possible that one of the things it does is make sure that the definition of the other scheduled tasks is still present, and possibly also, 'correct').
The other one is defined to run once (at the same time as the first one) plus 23 more times at hourly intervals. It's not possible (at least not in W8.1) to make it run eg every 6 hours, though I suspect it could be made to start at whatever is the time of day one stops working and then only run hourly for a smaller number of times. But it might well get redefined by the other scheduled task even if one does that, and if it does one would need to edit its definition every day.
Another possibility is to provide Dropbox with a file named "DropboxCleanup.exe" which IS a program, but is not the cleanup one. I have two small programs both of which do absolutely nothing when run and are designed (if that's the word) to be used in situations where a named program must exist (for some application to work properly) but one doesn't want anything to happen when they are run. I'll experiment and see if I can get Dropbox to run either or both of these rather than the real cleanup program.
There is a problem with this, which is that for all we know, DropboxCleanup might actually be doing a whole set of things properly and then after those - maybe - having the DLL error and stopping. Replacing it with a dummy program means it won't do anything at all.
Well I read everything and all of us started getting the pop up error in March 2023, same for me. Obvious that Dropbox pushed out an auto update that was not correct. I am going to not spend one more second of my time on this and just ignore the pop up until Dropbox pushes out a fix. HELLO DROPBOX - Fix your stuff.
