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#11
Okay sorry bro, I don't know what else to do/where else to look. Maybe someone else who's more familiar with this can join in on this.
Okay sorry bro, I don't know what else to do/where else to look. Maybe someone else who's more familiar with this can join in on this.
Marking this solved, gave it a while to see if I was right and I seem to be.
Realized there was a common thread in all this: Trillian, my chat program. Both when I first noticed it happening and this last time, it was just after I'd installed it, and after checking further into the matter I learned that it tries to set a task for turning it on when it's first installed. I have no idea why it's still trying to do it and I can't seem to get it to stop (might be a Win10 incompatibility of some kind), but it's not doing anything harmful and only does it when I have the program itself on so I'm leaving it alone.
You are a hero.
I have had the same problem, and while I assume others have as well, I think you're the only person who has resolved it in any forum I've been able to google. For about the first year I had my current laptop, a 2015 ASUS ROG model, semi-regularly, between 11:00 pm and 2:00 am, and mysteriously have a ~3x5 inch blank white window pop up in the middle of my screen for a half second and then disappear. It stopped happening sometime fall last year and I forgot about it until tonight. I did a long overdue System Ninja check and saw the same format of random scheduled tasks with process names that those windows had months ago and you described: open bracket, 8 random hexidecimal characters, a dash, a few blocks of 4 hex characters, another dash, and then a bunch more hex followed by a close bracket.
Because they're random they were almost impossible to properly google forum results for until I found your post in bleepingcomputer and here. Even though I have a totally different build it's the same issue: I totally forgot I installed Trillian on this computer even though I used it maybe twice in May 2015. I've been low-key worried I had Spetznas malware hiding deep in C:\ for a year and a half, and it turned out to just be a bloated chat client whose usefulness peaked in 2012.
Yep, it's Trillian. I think it was trying and failing to set a scheduled task for itself. Weirdly, it'll still do it after Trillian's uninstalled. Had to reset my install to get it to go away.
For future reference you can use NirSoft's TaskSchedulerView to search all task data as a single monolithic database. The problem with Microsoft's implementation is that they force you to do it on a category-by-category basis. This is much faster and easier, should you ever find yourself in a similar boat again (I learned this because DriverUpdate would run a batch job at irregular intervals, and I found this annoying cmd.exe window popping up on my desktop from time to time).
HTH,
--Ed--
Last edited by EdTittel; 11 Jan 2018 at 22:11. Reason: Fix typo
Hi all,
Whilst it seem that this was solved I had the same problem but Trillian was nowhere in sight. I investigated further and actually found the real cause. It is published on this forum in the new thread below.
Hidden Task Revealer
Please direct any responses to this message to the new thread as this thread is old. This message has been posted to inform people with similar queries like myself who found this article via Google.
Cheers
Andy Bruin
There have been a lot of discussions in Andy Bruin's thread Hidden Task Revealer - TenForums aka Ghost Task Revealer - TenForums
A fully-functioning fix has been posted in that thread at post #56
GhostTaskSuppressor v1.3
Denis