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

Anonymous
2022-02-12T17:29:29+00:00

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

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Files, folders, and storage

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-03-15T20:36:15+00:00

    Change the sync settings so the files download - or tolerate the ugly thing. :(

    I have same issue but I cannot access any files with the icon which is all of my files. So I wish i could tolerate it but.... any ideas of how to fix this?

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-03-22T22:37:52+00:00

    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 have this problem too and can't find a solution.

    I don't know if this will be helpful, but I went to go click on the right-click the dropbox icon in the system tray to check my sync settings, and the icon wasn't there. I realized that dropbox wasn't "running". I started up dropbox, and once it started running, the brown box was replaced by the appropriate dropbox sync icon (grey cloud, closed green circle+white check, open green circle+green check), and I was able to access those files again. I hope this works for you and everyone else who is having this issue because it was driving me crazy that there were absolutely no posted resolutions to the issue anywhere online.

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  3. Diane Poremsky MVP 17,526 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-03-23T01:59:58+00:00

    If you have multiple sync apps installed, you may always have the ugly brown icon, even when signed in.

    What is the Brown File Box Icon on Files in Windows 11? | @Poremsky.com

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-03-26T23:12:01+00:00

    Can you clarify what you mean when you say that DropBox wasn't running? How did you start it up?

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-03-27T00:18:59+00:00

    It wasn’t running in the background like usual. Files weren’t being synced. I doubled-clicked on my desktop icon to start the application. Then the little icon showed up in the system tray (bottom right of desktop) where I could right-click and open Dropbox app settings. My files started syncing again and the brown boxes were replaced by the Dropbox icons.

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