ME: A few hours ago my dropbox taskbar applet stopped working correctly. Prior to this the applet functioned as expected.

Clicking the indicator icon in my taskbar no longer brings up the dialogue box allowing me to see syncing files, manage preferences, etc; instead it simply flashes a blank black box and then closes. I installed the .deb from the dropbox website on a fresh install of ubuntu 14.04 just to be certain the issue was with the dropbox install and not some other aspect of the OS. I then tested it under a different desktop environment (unity) and found that both it and windows 7 display the dialogue box correctly. I suspect that this issue is xfce specific.

Heres a video displaying the bugged dialogue box: https://vid.me/bHnF

The question mark icon is the dropbox applet. Prior to this bug the OS recognized it as such and pulled a dropbox icon from /usr/share/icons, but that is no longer the case.

Files are still being synced both down and up from the device but not having the gui applet breaks some vital functionality for me. As this issue is reproducible on a fresh install of ubuntu, and only occurred a short time ago I suspect its related to a recent server side upgrade. Any help you could provide in resolving this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Device: Ubuntu 14.04 and XFCE

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DROPBOX SUPPORT TEAM: Hi alex,

Thank you for alerting us to this problem.

Please note that we're already aware of this problem and that Dropbox engineers are working on a solution while you're reading these words. However, we cannot provide a specific date in which the fix would be ready.

Some have managed resolution for this issue by uininstalling and reinstalling the Dropbox application. Here are the steps, in case thy are necessary.

First, make sure you save and quit ALL programs that access files in the Dropbox folder.

Depending on your OS and the package you used to perform the installation, you could have files in two different locations. I'm sending you instructions for both of the cases, so if some of the commands error out don't worry.

Run the following commands in your terminal:

dropbox stop
dropbox status # Should report "not running"
rm -rf ~/.dropbox-dist
rm -rf /var/lib/dropbox
rm -rf ~/.dropbox*
sudo apt-get remove nautilus-dropbox
sudo apt-get remove dropbox
rm /etc/apt/source.d/dropbox

Once you're done you have two options:

1) Install the Dropbox application with its graphical components using one of our packages. If you want to do that, download the correct package for your OS and architecture here:

https://www.dropbox.com/install?os=linux

Open your downloads folder and double click on the package file to start the installer. At this point, Dropbox will ask for your account information and you will be good to go!

2) The second option is to run a headless version of Dropbox. This version will not have any of the menus or graphical components and can only be interacted with through the command line. To install this version do the following:

If your machine is 32-bit:

cd ~ && wget -O - "https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86" | tar xzf -

If your machine is 64-bit:

cd ~ && wget -O - "https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64" | tar xzf -

Next, run the Dropbox daemon from the newly created .dropbox-dist folder.

~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

More installation and CLI information is also available here:

https://www.dropbox.com/install

Hope this helps!

Regards,
Ed