I began the install of Dropbox the other day on my old Dell Optiplex 270 (OS is Ubuntu 12.04) The app appeared to be completed after a half hr or so but I noticed the Comp had slowed to a snail's pace with the inside fan running almost constantly (very busy cpu). I clicked on the search function in the "Software ctr" but nothing happened so I clicked cancel. Now the "cancel" is still turning the progress arrows after several hours. If I try to Remove dropbox it is only placed in the Que awaiting Search cancel to complete. I have no idea what to try next. I can bring up the terminal and follow instructions but I won't know what I am doing as yet. Hope someone will take pitty and help an old fellow clear this up.

You can open the System Monitor, select the Processes tab, and then kill any process by right-clicking and choosing Kill Process. Of course, you have to be able to identify the process on the long list of stuff that's always running.

Reboot to kill the hung-up process. If you have to force power-off your system should run fsck to clean up any filesystem errors. Once it comes up check what processes are running to see if anything is wrong. On an idle system there should be almost no network or disk traffic.

I went to SYS Monitor and it was a list 1.5ft long with mostly things I never even saw before...tried stopping a few that sounded bogus until the screen went black (metadata?) ??? anyway I did the hard reboot and started back up. Things seemed ok at first but the cpu gradually became loaded down. I got to the Software center and the progress wheel just keeps on spinning and says "Searching" under that it says "applying changes". Nothing I do stops the progress wheel.
The Dropbox icon is on the dash. Clicked on it to see what gives...said to sign in with my password....didn't do that incase it might make things worse.

You need to be careful what you choose to kill with the System Monitor. I know there are oodles of things listed, and most I have no idea what they are. If you happen to kill something critical to system operation, weird things might happen.

You might try clicking on the System Monitor's '%CPU' heading (maybe click twice) to move the processes eating most of the CPU cycles to the top. If you see one associated with the Dropbox application, try killing that.

You can also kill things from the terminal. Type 'ps -A' to get a list of all running processes. You can then kill a process with 'kill ####' where #### is the PID number listed by the ps command. Again, you must be able to identify the process. 'ps -Af' lists more information including cumulative CPU time.

If it's the Sofware Center that won't quit running, you might try killing it from the System Monitor. I have done that once or twice successfully.

I managed to find a solution to this Dropbox install failure elsewhere but thought I would write it up here incase someone else has the need.
I opened up a Terminal and typed in: sudo dpkg --force-remove-reinstreq --remove nautilus-dropbox
A window opened after this command string and wanted my password for a new install (no way!) cancelled it and all was well.
Rich

1 members found this post helpful.