Windows 10 issues?

I am having the exact same issue on the exact same laptop configuration.

Same issue here. Yesterday my computer screen started flashing. Lost all my Systray icons and could not go to start menu. Uninstalled iCloud and issue resolved however I lost all my audio books from my iPhone 5s. Tried to restore iPhone to no avail. Just had to uninstall iCloud again. Luckily I placed a CMD shell on my desktop so I could restart (shutdown -r).

I encountered this issue on mine and my wife’s computers shortly after upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10 Home (wife’s) and Professional (mine). My observation was that several running apps were failing during this erratic behavior and through a process of elimination (disabling apps) I found that disabling “iCloud Photos” in the Startup section of Task Manager stopped this erratic behavior and survived reboots. And, iCloud continued to function properly with Outlook sharing both Contacts and Calendars with our networked computers, my iPad and iPhone.

During this period of troubleshooting I didn’t uninstall or change iCloud in any way except to disable iCloud Photos from starting whenever our computers restarted. However, I might have discovered the root cause of this problem, at least for our computers. Yesterday I discovered that I couldn’t save a picture attached to an E-mail to the Pictures folder or any of its sub folders on our computers. Turns out that when I clicked on the Pictures folder, right clicked and selected Properties, and then clicked on Security; the computer’s owner/administrator “MyName (Computer-Name\MyName)” was either not listed under the “group or users name” (on my wife’s computer) or was listed (on mine), but had no privileges. This issue also existed for all underlying folders, which included iCloud Photos. I discovered that by either updating my wife’s computer to include her in the Security Section with Permissions set to Full Control or in my case to update my Permissions to Full Control; the correct Permissions updated at the Picture folder level and were then enumerated to all underlying folders and I could save new pictures to all folders.

I’ve now enabled “iCloud Photos” in the Startup section of Task Manager and the erratic behavior has not returned.

It appears that during the upgrade process security and permissions were somehow messed up because it all worked on Windows 7.

If others still have an issue, you might want to look at the security properties of the Pictures folder; which should influence all underlying folders. Interestingly, the Documents, Music, Videos, etc. folders were okay and didn’t exhibit this problem.

Thanks for your post. I took your advice and checked the security permissions on all my folders. Low and behold they were all messed up. I corrected them per your instructions and now iCloud is working perfectly. I highly recommend to anyone who is having issues with iCloud after upgrading to Windows 10 to follow Buck115's instructions...they work perfectly. Thanks again.

I had to uninstall iCloud on my Windows 10 machine because it made Explorer (both the shell and the file manager itself) VERY unstable. I'd have Explorer hang on me multiple times a day resulting in me having to force the explorer.exe processes to quit and reload and there were times, many times, in which only a reboot would fix it. iCloud essentially made my Windows 10 machine unusable.

After changing the security settings on the folder and rebooting iCloud loaded with no issues. Thanks.