Mysterious green checkmarks on desktop

In the past week or so, I have noticed that the shortcuts (aliases) on my desktop are being festooned with tiny green checkmarks. For example, last time I started up my Windows VM, I saw:



Now, just passing my cursor OVER the aliases (not even clicking) made each of the checkmarks (plus some other icons) change to Xs:



and currently, in a VM which has been running for a couple days, I have neither checkmarks nor Xs on these shortcuts, just the standard little curvy arrow shortcut symbol.

I've Googled the syndrome, and the common response is that this is a Norton Backup artefact. But I have never installed Norton or any other backup (I just backup the whole VM outside Windows). I use MS's Defender anti-virus, and run MalwareBytes Anti-Rootkit in the background — my other anti-viruses are "launch manually to run" types.

Does anybody know what Lassie is trying to tell me, here?

What happens when you right click on a blank space on the desktop and select Refresh?

I'll have to do that next time I see the arrows. They're not there all the time; they're not there now. When they show up, it's just after booting the system, so I'll watch for them and try this.

Unfortunately, making them go away with refresh still wouldn't explain what they are, who put them there, and what they are trying to indicate.

They are indicating that something is backing up your desktop to the cloud. Do you have Onedrive set to sync your desktop?

Unless Onedrive is something that sets itself up in Windows 10, no. I don't even know what Onedrive is, much less activated it. I don't use cloud storage or backup services.

Any third party anti-virus or anti-malware programs?

As stated in the first post.

macsrwe said:

As stated in the first post.

It's probably the Malware Bytes indicating it has scanned those files.

I'll check it out. It would have to be the Anti-Exploit (which I was just reminded is the "new" name for the old Anti-Rootkit) because it's the only one that runs automatically. The other one has to be started manually, and these arrows only appear at boot time.

Norton does this if you have that.