What are these brown box icons in left bottom corner of my files??

Anonymous
2022-03-07T21:29:56+00:00

Does anyone know where these small brown box icons came from and what they mean?? I suddenly have these little brown icons (looks like a small file box) on most of my files, Word, pdf, photos, etc. I've googled the daylights out of this and apparently lots of folks have the same question but no one has an answer. I hasn't affected my ability to open files but it's really annoying! (see pic below) Does it have something to do with my upgrade to Windows 11?

Thanks!

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Performance and system failures

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous
2022-04-23T00:35:08+00:00

Had this exact same issue today. The resolution was quick no reinstall. I'm on Win11, so perhaps that was a plus in this scenario. Here's the fix that worked for me:

  1. Open windows explorer <windows-key + e>
  2. If you're using OneDrive you should see something like "OneDrive - Personal" within the left-hand pane. If so, Right-Click to access the context-menu.
  3. You should see the menu-item: "Always keep on this device", select this.
  4. Recheck your desktop; no more brown boxes, yay!

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-03-30T19:30:40+00:00

    Harley,

    Thanks, that did it.

    It really is stupid to put the Unsubscribe function under Subscribe. Typical of MicroSoft.

    David

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-03-30T19:50:34+00:00

    David you are very welcome. The fact that Microsoft forces you to put all of your personal information, photos, videos, files, etc. In their cloud Is Ludacris. Stupid me in the beginning i uninstalled one drive and lost everything.

    -Harley

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-04-06T17:49:00+00:00

    This was the fix for me! Thank you so much, it's been doing my head in

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-04-09T15:35:13+00:00

    Nope, today I received another notification. How very annoying. I tried it again. Can I assume that since the "Unsubscribe" option was still available, that I indeed was NOT unsubscribed from the thread? When I go there now, it only has options to Subscribe and Subscribe to RSS feed. That seems promising.

    Just to be safe, I have now also turned off "Notify me when some responds...", thinking that this may have turned the Unsubscribe back On again. So if anybody responds to this, I won't know about it. I'll try to look at this thread in a week, but I was really just wanting to get rid of this thread, so who knows if I'll remember. :-)

    David

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