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Forum Discussion
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....
I started getting a similar error message on 3/4/23, but just once every time I start up my computer. I am using Windows 7.0. So far I just click "OK" and the program seems to run without problem and I don't get further messages. Under "Add or Remove Programs" it says Dropbox was installed on my computer on 2/21/23. That is weird because Dropbox Desktop has been installed on my computer since 2015 I believe, and I have never touched it since. I did a search for Desktopcleanup.exe and the search window found it in the Update folder. But when I went to that folder manually, the program is not there. Maybe it is hidden? A lot of weird things going on here.
I think the reason that your machine shows that Dropbox was installed recently is that Dropbox gets regular updates, and your machine is showing you the date that the most recent update was installed.
I see that even when one clicks "Reply" to someone-else's post, this forum software does not then show what text one's reply was to.
I replied to the post made by "Aquaritone" (on 03-07-2023 at 07-02am), and said in reply to their comment that
"Under "Add or Remove Programs" it says Dropbox was installed on my computer on 2/21/23.
That is weird because Dropbox Desktop has been installed on my computer since 2015 I believe, and I have never touched it since"
that:
I think the reason that your machine shows that Dropbox was installed recently is that Dropbox gets regular updates, and your machine is showing you the date that the most recent update was installed.
I'm also a Windows 8.1 user and I too have had this problem since it first started.
However (probably because I have my machine set up differently from most users) I've only seen the pop-up message about a specific missing DLL once. The difference here is that (as a programmer, someone who regularly sends full application dumps to software companies so they can fix problems) I have Windows configured to take full dumps whenever any application has a problem. Maybe that generally interferes with / prevents the pop-up message from appearing.
So every time that (probably) other users see a message, I get another application dump. Windows manages these so there's not an every growing set of them - each time a new dump happens Windows deletes the oldest copy. It also logs the problem in an eventlog record. Interesting the eventlog record does not name the missing DLL; instead it describes the exact point in an executing program where the problem occurs. That information is of no use to a user but it would enable Dropbox staff to fix this, if they'd only pay attention.
The times that the problem (and dumps) happen is the hourly interval at which two scheduled tasks (defined by Dropbox, not me) run to look for possible updates to Dropbox. The task names are "DropboxUpdateTaskUserS-x-x-xx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxCore" and "DropboxUpdateTaskUserS-x-x-xx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxUA". (The xxxx parts are the registry internal GUID names of the userid under which Dropbox runs on my system.)
These tasks run: C:\Users\myuserid\AppData\Local\Dropbox\Update\DropboxUpdate.exe /c
and: C:\Users\myuserid\AppData\Local\Dropbox\Update\DropboxUpdate.exe /ua /installsource scheduler
and I expect that one of those actions probably tries to run DropboxCleanup.exe at the end of whatever else has been done.
I've already reported all of this (within ticket: 21118467 ) and offered copies of the dumps to Dropbox, who were not interested. But that might be because then, this was still recorded as "solved".
Although my eventlog records did not say what the missing DLL was, the original reporter of this problem did say -
"api-ms-win-core-heap-l2-1-0.dll"
I scanned my whole disk look for files whose name started "api-ms-win-core-heap" and found several copies (all slightly different internally, which is perfectly ok) in various applications, one in
C:\Users\myuserid\AppData\Roaming\Dropbox\bin\168.4.4802
(which was the 'stable' version of Dropbox at the time; now it's \bin\169.4.5684)
The DLL shipped in all those applications (Dropbox and the others) was: api-ms-win-core-heap-l1-1-0.dll
which is NOT the DLL that DropboxCleanup.exe is looking for. Note that the DLL that I have has an "L1" in its name but the one that is needed has an "L2".
I have no idea whether the issue is that Dropbox are shipping the wrong DLL, or whether their code is mistakenly trying to load the L2 version when it should be loading the L1 version. Maybe Windows 10 and 11 have the L2 version but someone's forgotten that W8[.1] and maybe W7 don't? But since Dropbox seem normally to ship standalone copies of these DLLs inside the application it seems odd to me that their code tries to load a DLL that they are not including in the application, when they DO include so many other DLLs including the older version of this one.
(I did also mention the DLL name discrepancy in my ticket.)
.
Moving on ... I'm sorry but I think that (Dropboxer) Hannah's recent comment (Mon 13 Mar, 6:53pm):
"I'm glad to see that after renaming the .exe file, this message didn't show up again."
is irresponsible.
The users are renaming part of the supplied/installed Dropbox application so that it cannot be found and run, to kill off an annoying error message. This is a terrible way for users to get rid of an annoyance. That part of Dropbox is surely MEANT TO BE RUN. By renaming it those users are PREVENTING it from doing whatever it is meant to do. No responsible /technical support/ person would ever see this as a solution. But maybe Hannah isn't a technical support person? But if she isn't, she shouldn't be commenting on a technical issue.
Oh - and one other thing. At no point in this problem has telling users to reinstall been sensible, UNLESS Dropbox support knew that they had missed the right DLL out of the installer and had since fixed that.
A missing DLL will not magically come back until Dropbox ship it.
All that reinstalls do is waste users' time.
Jeremy N.2
Thanks for your reply. I have made no attempts to fix the issue, but the error message has stopped appearing for about the last week. Dropbox is now showing up on my computer as having been updated on 3/8/23, so maybe that update contained a fix. I'll post if I get the error message again.
