Error Message 'Unable to open folder'

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Nat Overholtzer

I recently installed box drive on a new device, and after a few hours of normal use, I've been getting bombarded with a strange error message 'unable to open folder' for many folders i have tried opening (though certainly exist within our shared documents).

 

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75 comments

Date Votes
  • Luis Aguirre

    The regkey option does not work for us, the errors are constant and the only real workaround is to "ignore it" - this needs to be addressed. 

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  • Bryan Garrant

    Below is what ours looks like. Are you using tenable as well?

    Once we implemented this GPO and rebooted the pop ups went away.

     

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  • hawkeyeba

    I have people still having this issue. Does anyone know what causes this yet or if Box is planning on patching this issue? I have tried things people have suggested here. We have Win10 machines deployed if that helps.

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  • Bryan Garrant

    hawkeyeba

    Do you have any vulnerability scanning tool installed on your machines?

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  • hawkeyeba

    Bryan, we do have a AntiVirus software installed not sure if that does vulnerability scanning or not specifically.

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  • Jimmy Buck

    You need to look through the Box Drive logs and see which processes are accessing the files. And then exclude that .exe with the registry key outlined here. We were able to fix the issue by excluding powershell.exe for the tenable scanner.

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  • Box User

    So, I'm getting this today - over and over again.  This is on Windows 10.  It's clearly a defect in the Box Drive design - don't they have any intention of fixing it?  There is no reason I should have to remove or disable programs or their access to certain directories.  Box should work OK with the same things every other program is OK with.

     At a minimum, can't Box give us a way to reduce the number of messages?  For example, why can't I get just ONE notification each time Box goes through all the folders, instead of a notification for each of the (many) folders I have?

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  • Jimmy Buck

    While the registry keys worked for my enterprise, I totally agree that it shouldn't be necessary. When a company is debating between Box and OneDrive, the little things like this make a big difference.

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  • ITAdmin81

    Box Support provided the following explanation:  "This is a behavior that we have seen in the past and our Engineering Team has identified that this is caused by 3rd party programs traversing through the filesystem. When scanning files in the Box Drive folder, this triggers a download of any non-cached documents. For users with a large number of files, you'll see high CPU usage, network degradation, and if the download requests exceed a rate limit, you'll start receiving these notifications. Since the software continues to scan, the user gets hit with a bunch of notifications in quick succession."

    They recommend creating the "Banned Processes Name" registry key as others have mentioned previously...not the answer I was hoping for :(

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  • Box User

    I'd bet that hiding any directory from scanning by any program is against my company policy, since it would prevent any of their security or compliance related scan programs from seeing things there.

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  • hawkeyeba

    Agree with the last post. This is not a fix it's more of a workaround/band-aid to the problem. 

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  • Jimmy Buck

    Your company shouldn't be relying on tools that scan the users' PC's for Box security. You should be relying on Box's built-in virus scanning and/or using other tools that scan Box directly.

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  • hawkeyeba

    Jimmy Buck I don't think anyone is relying on a tool to scan the users PC for box security, it's endpoint security that's the concern. The Box Drive folders are still on the users endpoint and adding an exception is one place that you won't be looking for malicious content that could harm the computer.

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  • Jeffrey Allen

    I had this issue as well. Looking at the Box logs, Git was bombarding Box. For some reason, there was an open Git repository in the same folder as the Box Drive app scanning all of the files. After deleting the repository, the notices seem to have stopped. 

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  • esantana

    I found the culprit in my environment. Review the Streem file located in %localappdata%\Box\Box\Logs\Box_Stream_DATE.log

    To fix I remotely ran this command to fix. (Keep in mind for my environment it was EmUser.exe (Related to an Ivanti product we use)

    REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Box\Box" /v BannedProcessNames /t REG_MULTI_SZ /d EmUser.exe

    Here is a sample from log file...

    2022-09-21 12:06:11.577 ERROR 0x00004494 [winfs:647][onEnumerateDirectory] [EmUser.exe] ..\streemfs\filesystem\folderfetch\folderfetcher.cpp(114): Throw in function void __cdecl box::throwAppropriateFetchErrorIfNecessary(const class std::shared_ptr<class box::BaseFSFolder> &)
    Dynamic exception type: struct boost::wrapexcept<class box::FSTimeoutException>
    std::exception::what: Unknown exception
    [struct box::exceptionInodeIdObject * __ptr64] = 43553 

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