Quick CMD-Prompt pops up and disappears - Related to Activation Key..?

Noticed when I install a fresh copy of Windows 10 Creators Update and don't have the computer connected to the network / internet...

When the PC starts and logs in to the desktop I notice one or sometimes two CMD Prompt-like Windows quickly appear and disappear on the screen. (They flash up and disappear near-instantaneously).

Is this related to Windows Product Key authentication?

Just need someone who has the knowledge or time to confirm this on a fresh install to give their advice.

Simply trying to rule out malware which might have been installed when I was away from the computer.

EdTittel said:

It could be just about anything. Most likely it is some kind of scheduled task that runs upon or immediately after startup that calls a batch file of some kind (which launches in a command prompt window). When I had something like this happen on my PCs a couple of years ago, I had to resort to Nirsoft's TaskSchedulerView to ferret out what was causing those Windows to pop up. Why? Because the built-in Task Scheduler won't let you search all scheduled tasks en masse (you have to look at them one at a time, category by category). TaskSchedulerView will let you search the whole shebang all at once. While what I did may not work for you, it did work for me: I simply searched for "*.bat" to find all tasks that called batch files and it found it for me, no sweat. I wrote a blog post about this that you might find helpful: Take control of Windows tasks with TaskSchedulerView.

I guessed product key activation because there was an error in EventVwr caused by CMD-Prompt at about that time (within that minute) that had to do with Windows License Key activation.

I'll try TaskSchedulerView but was warned away from NirSoft products when an old AntiVirus I used to have flagged them as malware.

It was probably a false-positive due to Heuristic Analysis but it spooked me a bit.

I've been using NirSoft utilities for more than a decade and never had a problem... just regular false positives.

The other advantage of TaskSchedulerView over Task Scheduler is that the former shows 'hidden' tasks. Note that you need to run TaskSchedulerView (and/or Task Scheduler) as System to adjust/disable some of the tasks.

Hope this helps...