Ubuntu – Dropbox 3.2.9 ignoring local themes / missing notification icon

After upgrading from xubuntu 13.10 to 14.04, I found that dropbox needed re-installation on my system, amongst a slew of other problems. I performed the following as suggested here:

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/dropbox/.dropbox-dist
dropbox start -i

EDIT: as this had failed to resolve the problem described below, I have also tried to install Dropbox from the .deb from here for Ubuntu.

This has installed dropbox version 3.2.9 which appears to be working again, however the notifier icon in the xfce4-panel does not abide by the locally set theme/icons:

Here, I am using elementary-xfce-dark, and can confirm that the Dropbox status icons I want to use are present in /usr/share/icons/elementary-xfce-dark/panel.

However, the icons actually being used (~/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-3.2.9/images/hicolor/16x16/status) are PNG files with transparency, however on inspection the background is #EFEBE7, which suggests the alpha channel is being used, and something else is setting this as the background color.

UPDATE

On occasion, the Dropbox icon doesn't appear in the xfce4-panel at all after a reboot, either in the notification area, or the system tray.

PARTLY RESOLVED

So, err, after purging then re-installing Dropbox from here using the .deb package, I now intermittently see this after each hard reboot:

Here's a list of everything I can remember I did before the hard reboot:

• Installed the following:
  • libappindicator1 (tried because of these tips, found it was already installed);
  • libappindicator3-1 (was not already installed)
  • libappindicator3-dev (was not already installed)
• Followed the tip from here which disables auto-start of the indicator-application-service at login (called 'Indicator Application' in the 'Session and Startup'/'Application Autostart' menu);
• Sacrificed several goats.

I can confirm that:

• The running version is being invoked from ~/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-3.2.9/;
• The dropbox icon appears in the notification area, not the system tray, of the xfce4-panel;
• $ python --version produces Python 2.7.6

I'm uncertain as to precisely which, if any, of the above steps were necessary to affect the appearance of the icon. Again, disappointingly, the icon only appears intermittently — once out of every few shutdown/boot cycles, so YMMV!

I also note that when it is present, the icon(s) and theme/style being used are still not consistent with the locally set theme. For example, check out the tooltips :

…versus…

PROGRESS NOTES

• There appears to be chatter about this problem here, and here, suggesting that the latest version of dropbox (3.0.3) now uses the Qt UI. The behavior of dropbox 3.0.3 to ignore local themes also seems to apply to other linux distributions such as Mint and Arch.
• This page suggests that xfce4 had a bug which did not permit Qt5 software from using the local theme. However, upgrading to xfce4-session version 4.11 has not solved the problem.
• I'm about to embark on a fresh install of xubuntu 14.0.4-1 to address other issues, so I'll report back here as to whether the problem persists.
• After installing a fresh version of xubuntu 14.04-1, I now see no dropbox notification icon at all! I presume that if I find a way of activating it again, I might still have the same problem. I'll keep on it…
• Trying out various installation options (deb files from the dropbox website, compiling and installing from source) has not yielded any solution yet. Suggestions welcome!