nVidia folder being created at c:\ after every reboot

More info on this - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce...k-ago/2770043/

In the past, nVidia drivers had a Telemetry service which created in some cases up to 9 scheduled tasks. Lots of people complained; often it got turned off. Then at some point nVidia got rid of the service and the nvtelemetry executables. My guess was that they found a more discrete (or should I say "nefarious") way of collecting telemetry that users couldn't disable.

Well, it looks as if that was buried in nvcplui.exe. At some point I was experimenting with blocking this in my firewall after seeing the program (via wireshark), repeatedly sending data out. As I restored from an image of my PC that didn't have this firewall rule the problem went away.

Perhaps nVidia gave up on telemetry altogether and nvcplui.exe phones home for some other reason, but I'm skeptical. Telemetry is the lifeblood of every business now, I can't imagine them just giving up on it.

Then I started working on my automation script again, which added the rule back, and sure enough, when nvcplui.exe wants to send data out and the firewall blocks it, the folder gets created.

I'm reinstalling windows at present, but once I'm done I'll do some more monitoring with wireshark.

If that proves to be what's happening at that point I either don't block the nv control panel ui or I add a workaround to delete it in my login script.