Files have a brown box on their icon and dont open in Windows 11

What is going on here? There is no information anywhere so it obviously isnt a problem for everyone.

Most of my files stored on Dropbox now have a small brown file box icon on the lower left corner of the main icon for all MS Office files. They open perfectly well on the phone and a laptop running Windows 10 but not on my laptop running Windows 11.

I get an error message saying the program cant open it because the file is unsupported or may be corrupt.

Why the **** do they release an OS that doesn't work with their own programs??

Please help,

Thanks

I'm having the same problem. I have had countless random glitches of this nature take place since switching to Windows 11, Font packages literally disappearing from Adobe causing all of Adobe's UI to display no text, registry files breaking for no reason, I didn't even want to upgrade to Windows 11 because I knew it was going to be as all Microsoft releases; A complete and total **** show. Not to mention my CPU usage with 16gb of Ram sits at 50%+ ALL THE TIME since downgrading to Windows 11 when it sat around 11% prior.

I'm about done with Windows, Apple may be slow on the innovation side right now but at least their **** works and it works well.

Hello all,

I also had the brown shoe box icon overlay problem the other day on all of my sync files (in my case it was One Drive related).

Long story short, following advice from Microsoft Support on this issue, please try the following very simple fix maybe before doing anything else:

(a) Open Task Manager with Ctrl-Alt-Del and then select "Task Manager"

(b) Find Windows Explorer under Apps and select it.

(c) Right click mouse and End Task

(d) Close Task Manager

(e) Reopen File Explorer

If this does not work for you then move on to the next trouble shooting idea (e.g. checking your sync service is activated, etc, etc.

Apparently sometimes Windows Explorer can just get itself in a mess.

It's not quite "turn it off and back on again" but heading in that direction.

That fixed my problem. I spent hours on the chat with dropbox help giving me all kinds of stupid solutions that would have resulted in losing thousands of files that he said would magically reappear in OneDrive. So glad I came here first. Thank you!

Bruh, try reading the thread. There are multiple possible solutions posted. Some fixes it by ensuring Dropbox was running in the system tray. Others by making sure One Drive was running in the system tray.

I have tried linking and unlinking my One Drive, and either way, I cannot get the brownbox to go away, and give me access to all my pictures. To be clear, these are all photo files stored in my desktop Dropbox, but somehow access is being denied by OneDrive, even though I am not syncing. Any thoughts?

Are you sure that onedrive is denying access? Is OneDrive also syncing dropbox?

I use dropbox and have the brown icon - only on files that are marked to keep on device. .

Is dropbox signed in?

Are the files marked for online only?