Computer tries to start program that's no longer installed.

Asymmetric · 08 Sep 2016

First off, I want to say that this is not a problem, but only an annoyance.

After upgrading from Win 7 to Win 10 on my sister-in-law's laptop, the computer tries to start up this program about every 2 minutes:

Computer tries to start program that's no longer installed.-error1.jpg

As you can see, it is no longer installed, so maybe it was a toolbar or some such that was attached to Internet Explorer, and was abandoned with the upgrade. I really don't know. That path no longer exists. I suspect that it's calling some kind of malware. I have done deep scans with both Windows Defender (lots of malware found) then Malwarebytes (no malware found) I have been unable to find where this program is being called from. It's not being called with the normal startup programs and I've looked at the start up programs called up from the registry (using regedit32) also, but I suspect it is indeed being called from the registry and there is probably more than one place to look, but I don't know where that is.
If anyone has some insight into how to get rid of this annoyance, I would really appreciate any advice. Thanks in advance.

Samuria · 08 Sep 2016

Welcome to the forum. Check to see if it's running as a task

Bree · 08 Sep 2016

Autoruns from the Microsoft Sysinternals suite can be used to remove this.
Instructions on using for this type of problem here:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/p...a-d02161d8bc19

f14tomcat · 08 Sep 2016

Bree said:

Autoruns from the Microsoft Sysinternals suite can be used to remove this.
Instructions on using for this type of problem here:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/p...a-d02161d8bc19

Just a quick add.... AUTORUNS must be executed with Admin Privileges or it will error. TC

Asymmetric · 08 Sep 2016

Samuria said:

Welcome to the forum. Check to see if it's running as a task

Correction:

Yes! You were exactly right!

Thanks for the welcome as well as the quick reply. I checked the task scheduler with the help of Microsoft Sysinternals, as suggested by Bree, and was able to delete this as well as other tasks that were pointing to items that were no longer installed. Thanks for the suggestion. Spot on!

f14tomcat · 08 Sep 2016

Asymmetric said:

Thanks for the welcome as well as the quick reply. I checked the tasks and this is not one of them. Next, I'm going to install Microsoft Sysinternals, as suggested by Bree. This looks promising.

You really don't need the entire suite, just Autoruns.

Autoruns for Windows

Asymmetric · 08 Sep 2016

Bree said:

Autoruns from the Microsoft Sysinternals suite can be used to remove this.
Instructions on using for this type of problem here:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/p...a-d02161d8bc19

Thanks for the suggestion! It worked fantastically, as you knew it would.

Asymmetric · 08 Sep 2016

f14tomcat said:

You really don't need the entire suite, just Autoruns.

Autoruns for Windows

Thank you for your suggestions. It never hurts to have fun tools to play with.

f14tomcat · 08 Sep 2016

Asymmetric said:

Thank you for your suggestions. It never hurts to have fun tools to play with.

You like fun tools? This makes a breeze out of installing suites of progs that come in ZIP format. Or any prog that comes as a ZIP. Does all the hard work for you. Been using it for years.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/zipinst.html

Asymmetric · 08 Sep 2016

f14tomcat said:

You like fun tools? This makes a breeze out of installing suites of progs that come in ZIP format. Or any prog that comes as a ZIP. Does all the hard work for you. Been using it for years.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/zipinst.html

Thanks, I'll give it a shot.