what are these brown boxes and how to remove them

After clicking through multiple Windows support pages (signed in, by the way), I still can't find any way to contact Windows support about One Drive. I recently upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11. Yesterday on my desktop, little brown box icons appeared on each of my desktop shortcut icons and files.  Is One Drive doing this?  I did not enable One Drive on my PC. I do not want One Drive to operate on my PC. Did One Drive copy my files? I can't find any answers from Microsoft Support. Can anyone here please help me? Thank you.

Hi,

The brown box icon might be related to a shortcut for 'files on demand,' commonly associated with OneDrive and Dropbox services. You mentioned you don't use OneDrive so this could potentially be related to Dropbox. If you don't use Dropbox either, then it could be due to a problem with Windows Explorer. To address this concern, you can follow these steps:

1. Press the Windows key + E.
2. Press CTRL + ALT + DEL and choose Task Manager.
3. Click on 'More details' to display all the apps.
4. Under the 'Apps' section on the Processes tab, right-click on Windows Explorer.
5. Select 'Restart' from the context menu.

Hope this helps.