Whelp, back with another inquiry. When trying to address this manually by removing system write permissions - its apparently inadequate.
System is owner
System has writes denied
just updated dropbox to test and it wrote anyways
what did i do incorrectly? :P
Why not just use winpatrol it does it all for you and gives notice if something trys to write to the reg
never heard of it. Will give it a look. That being said, i try to avoid third party software as often as possible. years into the same windows install with zero intention of ever formatting (rolling images) one needs to be aware of how much bloat theyre adding and stuff theyre relying on etc.
plus in this specific instance its probably something i should have learned to navigate a bit better manually to save potential trouble a long time ago.
Dont technically need anything to tell me if something writes to the key, i know when dropbox updates that something wrote to it >.< at that point i know to delete all the keys it made and restart explorer lest I lose my overlays.
in other instances I can see how it would be helpful though. This is a relatively fringe use I'd imagine. Lots of complaints about the overlay limit in windows but the software developers themselves often dont want to address it and microsoft seems to echo the sentiment that its buried in such an integral way that to address it would be tantamount to a rewrite of major windows systems. I tend to believe them since they went through the trouble to change onedrive overlays entirely away from using the system and the apple icloud for windows followed suit.
either way will give it a look, I appreciate the suggestion.
EDIT - holy cow. talk about a hard to find piece of software (at least the portable variant). Seems to be old/deprecated but pretty universally appreciated.
- - - Updated - - -
is this in addition to write owner/write DAC?
and thank you once again :)
Here's my experience with that infernal Dropbox stepping on my OneDrive Overlays.
At the begining of a clean install, obviously OneDrive is at the very top of this exclusive 14 member list.
As most other suffers have found, after installing Dropbox for the first time, it adds '3 spaces' in the front of it's overlays - now putting all of theirs in first place. At this point I only see overlays for Dropbox but none of OneDrive's.
My workable solution, as long as I don't manually update Dropbox; that is, instead let it's updater task do it - about every 14 days - and one that I've found holds, AND that allows me to see all of OneDrive's Overlays, while still seeing the most important Dropbox Overlays*** is this - I add 4 spaces in front of all of OneDrive's Overlays and a fourth space in front of DropboxExt05, putting it as the only Dropbox overlay at the top.
*** Blue 'Sync' circular arrows, and the green 'Updated' check marks.
Of course, Dropbox and OneDrive are my only overlays, so this workaround 'solution' may be limited to this example which for me has been holding true since version 2004.
blecgh. somehow locking system out from writing to this registry key also removes the darn dropbox context menu after it updates. weird, and makes this not worthwhile for me.
back to deleting those every time dropbox updates.
Quote
