DropBox leaks suspended processes when it cannot poke through your HTTP Proxy
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/03/08
On Windows, when you have a HTTP Proxy Server and DropBox cannot poke through it, it pops up a window asking if you want to change the “Connection Settings”.
When you have a busy proxy that denies access when busy, but allows when not busy, the window disappears and DropBox continues.
So far so good you think?
Not! DropBox creates suspended process instances of itself when showing or removing the window.
And when DropBox exits, it doesn’t cleanup those suspended processes: you have to do that yourself.
They take up a couple of hundred kilobyte each.
You can use Taskkill. to clean them up like this:
C:\users\jeroenp>taskkill /F /IM Dropbox.exe
Which gave this result on my machine after about 15 minutes:
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 22632 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 23680 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 21240 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 22312 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 22568 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 23116 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 23288 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 5328 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 16784 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 17248 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 15056 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 21508 has been terminated.
SUCCESS: The process "Dropbox.exe" with PID 16276 has been terminated.
I’ve seen this behaviour on Windows 7.
–jeroen
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