installed caja dropbox from the software boutique. other than being able to open it, i have no other way to interact with it. here (hopefully) is a short video of the issue.
Restart your session. Then (the indicator shouldn’t appear), try the following in a terminal:
dropbox stop
env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Unity dropbox start -i
If the Dropbox indicator appears and is functional, go into its prefs dans disable autostart. Then, copy caja-dropbox.desktop from /sur/share/applications to ~/.config/autostart and restart your session: does Dropbox start fine?
i tried restarting sessions and the computer several times to no avail. i solved the issue by reinstalling ubuntu (fresh hard drive, etc) and installed dropbox from the deb on the dropbox website.
I forgot to update my message: there is indeed an issue with Dropbox on Ubuntu MATE 17.10 (there’s another thread about it). For some reason, it works fine when installing UM 17.04 and upgrading to 17.10 but not from a clean 17.10 install.