Thursday, October 30, 2014

Google Drive is Preventing My PC from Shutting Down

…and Google doesn’t seem to care!  There are posts from years ago on the Google forums, and responses from Google admin saying “we’re looking into this,” but the problem still exists (in Win 7 and Win 8).

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(screenshot from BleepingComputer.com – click for link to thread)

I have tried uninstalling/reinstalling Google Drive, but to no avail.  And it’s a serious pain in the butt, because every time you do this, in order to associate a folder with Google Drive, the drive has to be empty (you can’t associate a folder with any contents).  So once you’ve reinstalled Google Drive, you have to create a new folder, associate it with Google Drive, dump all the contents of your old Google Drive into the new folder, rename the folder, and then wait for Google Drive to figure out what the hell just happened (update sync database).

In a thread discussing problems with Piriform’s CCLeaner and Google Drive, I found this information:

When the Google Drive application is running, it creates a directory under C:\Users\Chukhung\AppData\Local\Temp with a name like "_MEI54082" (the last five digits of the directory name change every time the Google Drive application is started). Within this directory are a large number of subdirectories, DLLs, and what appear to be Python files. This directory disappears when the Google Drive application is shut down manually.  [. . .] I'm guessing that Google Drive gets seriously confused when CCleaner partially deletes the contents of this directory.

This seems like a pretty decent guess as to why this is happening, but I’m not sure what to do about it (other than to always manually shut down Google Drive before shutting down the computer, which isn’t exactly an ideal solution).

I will update this post if I find a solution, but in the meantime, feel free to post your thoughts/solutions in the comments!

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

I too am having this problem, and lot's of people are according to forums I've read, but Google is not doing anything.

I don't use (or know what it is) CCleaner, but I'm still affected.

The Invisible said...

Yeah... it's gotten really annoying on my machine... to the point that if I can't find a solution today, I will definitely be removing Google Drive from my computer (and starting to use Drop Box and One Drive more).

Anonymous said...

Its June 2015 now, and this problem still has not been solved!! While I did everything that was instructed on the Google Drive forum. Plus: that thread has been closed/locked. Booooooooo, Google!!!

Allan said...

Yeah, me too since Win 8.1 and now I'm Win 10. SAME issue :(

Anonymous said...

Same, just die already Google drive.

melaku44 said...

Yes. This is still happening in 2016. What the hell google? If they won't fix this, only option is to uninstall drive.

The Invisible said...

Yep. I uninstalled Google Drive from my machines long ago (like, when this post was made). I still use Google Drive to *send things* sometimes, but I only have OneDrive on my actual machines.

Unknown said...

1.Type System Configuration in the Search Box
2. If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
3. Click the General tab, click Selective startup, and then clear the Load system services and the Load startup items check boxes.
4. Select the Load system services check box, click OK, and then click Restart.

Anonymous said...

Won't this prevent all startup items from running? Isn't that an extreme way to solve this problem with Google Drive?

]neil said...

Same problem here.

Unknown said...

Disabling startup items is a terrible advice, don't do it!
My way of dealing with the Google Drive problem is auto-killing it when the system is shutting down.
Save this command in a .cmd file somewhere: taskkill /f /im googledrivesync.exe
Run the cmd file on your system shutdown. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12434863/executing-a-batch-script-on-windows-shutdown