Tag Archives: dropbox

Dropbox Conflict with Trend Micro Office Scan

Trend Micro makes antivirus products that apparently don’t work very well with Dropbox.
Two or three weeks ago my Dropbox started acting VERY slow – it would make the Windows taskbar and system tray unresponsive when uploading or downloading files, although running applications were unaffected. After taking the usual troubleshooting steps, I found that the issue didn’t occur in Safe Mode, indicating that it was caused by some conflict with a non-Windows piece of software. I suspected the school-installed virus scanner (Trend Micro Officescan), but couldn’t confirm it because the security policy prevents users from disabling it. Luckily, someone found a workaround to replace the passwords that prevent users from uninstalling or unloading OfficeScan: overwrite the hash values in Officescan’s configuration file. It’s an easy fix, and once I reset the password using that method, I was unable to unload OfficeScan and get my Dropbox working smoothly again! I’m not sure whether the issue is caused by real-time file scanning or the firewall, but either way, I’d rather have no virus protection than go without Dropbox. Dropbox is at the center of my common planning workflow: it lets me stay in sync with my common planning team and keeps the files on my home and office computers up to date.