Failure to Launch

[Florentino Gracia]

I had the same problem. It seems it is a compatibility problem with the last dropbox version.

In my case, i uninstalled dropbox and explorer plugin worked again.

[Anton Korduan]

Sounds interesting, Florentino. I’ve dropbox installed too.
Just disabling it seems not to be enough (“exit dropbox”) even the process in taskmanager is gone, n++ wont start.

Hm … dont’ want to deinstall dropbox, its necessary for my Cloud-Backup.
Testing Sublime now.

[Anton Korduan]

By the way: Nadeem, how can I disable the Explorer plugin?
Just moving the explorer.dll seems not to be enough.
How do you start the PluginManager without starting N++?

[Nadeem Hosenbokus]

Anton - I just need to move the .dll file into the “disabled” folder. However that didn’t work the first time around for me either. I had to do a complete uninstall, delete the %appdata%/notepad++ folder and remove all configuration files (including the ones stored by Dropbox/GoogleDrive/etc if you’ve set a cloud backup) then do a fresh, clean install.

[Anton Korduan]

Uff … okay, thanx Nadeem! Seems a lot of work …
I will try this later.

Now I explore Sublime - its interesting.
But the FTP-Plugins are not so well, seems to me. There is no permanent window to browse.

[Gary and Ellie Field]

Removing Dropbox fixed the problem with NPP. Unfortunately, I need Dropbox more than NPP. I hope this gets fixed soon. Like other people have written, I need Dropbox.

[Jeff Cohan]

@Florentino-Gracia Thank you, sir! Uninstalling dropbox (which showed an update date of 8/19/2016) solved it for me, too.

[Bruce Riggins]

Renaming the Program Files (x86)/Notepad++/plugins/Explorer.dll to something like Explorer.dll.old will allow NPP to invoke again. I emailed the Dropbox technical folks - they may or may not be aware that their latest update screws with NPP.

[Claudia Frank]

Jfyi -to start npp without any plugins loaded (they don’t get deleted/renamed etc… just ignored) use the -noPlugin switch.
See ? menu -> Command line arguments.

Cheers
Claudia

[Joris de Ruiter]

---------------- FIX ----------------

I just found the problem of Dropbox. The problem is in the Shell Explorer DLL of Dropbox (that takes care of things like the sync icons in Windows Explorer in the Dropbox directory).

You can still use Dropbox AND Notepad++ using the following method:

• Download ShellExView from NirSoft. Make sure you download the 32-bit version of ShellExView, because Notepad++ uses the 32-bit DLL’s of Dropbox.

• Start ShellExView and sort the list by Description.

• Select all the items from Dropbox

• Disable all the selected items by pressing F7, or right-click->Disable selected items, or click the red-dot-icon in the upper toolbar.

• Explorer.exe already loaded all these DLL’s, so restart explorer.exe with the Taskmanager, or just simply log out in Windows and login again.

• Now Notepad++ should start, with any explorer plugin’s enabled and with Dropbox installed.

Possibly this fix will be temporary, because Dropbox can update the DLL and I don’t know what happens with the disabled items. But of course you can just run ShellExView again to fix this.

I encountered the problem using the LightEplorer plugin and the WindowManager plugin in Notepad++. Now it all works again.

[Anton Korduan]

Thanx, Joris. Hope, there will be a solution from the NPP-Developer(s) soon.

[Jerod Johnson]

Just wanted to confirm that uninstalling Dropbox resolved the issue for me as well.

[Roy Reed]

Notepad++ will only run for me on Win7 in admin mode unless I delete (or rename) plugins\Explorer.dll. I use Dropbox too often to uninstall it. Hopefully either the Explorer plugin or Dropbox will get an update to overcome this glitch.

[Joris de Ruiter]

------------- Edit: FIX -------------

Downloading the 32-bit version of ShellExView did not work. So it doesn’t matter if you download the x86 or x64 version of the program, make sure you’re only disabling the 32-bit DLL’s:

• Go to Options in the toolbar and enable the first option Show 32-bit Shell Extensions

After that, you can sort the list and disable every Dropbox item in the list. Both Notepad++ AND Dropbox will still work fine after this.

Let’s hope the Dropbox- or Notepad++ developers come with a solution. In the meantime I hope this will help anyone with the same problem.

[Nadeem Hosenbokus]

Joris de Ruiter - You star!!! Disabling the Dropbox context menus works. Thank you so much!

[Justin Eskridge]

Thanks for sharing the info, Joris! Disabling all Dropbox shell extensions per your instructions seems to have fixed the problem. Strangely, I still have Dropbox context menus and icon overlays. It took a couple of reboots, but it seems that NPP launches just fine now, and I didn’t have to uninstall anything or disable Explorer Lite. Good luck!

[David Glasser]

I’m having the same problem with the explorer plugin. Any update on a permanent fix?

[Nigel Long]

I’ve just manually updated Dropbox to 8.4.21 (released early today, 24/Aug) and that seems to have put things right. Dropbox does not seem to pick up small increments automatically so I went through www.dropbox.com

I have cured ‘failure to launch’ on Windows 10 64-bit, WIndows 7 64-bit and Windows 7 starter, so it looks promising. I have tried as many plugins as possible to try and provoke failure but so far it’s looking good.

[Bruce Riggins]

My Dropbox version is now at 8.4.21 and the NPP Explorer plugin issue appears to have been fixed.

[Rana Rananjay Singh]

If you move explorer.dll from disable then you have to give permission to current user to access and it will fix :)