Something Pops Up in the Taskbar

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 01 Jun 2006 20:07:39 Post Subject: Something Pops Up in the Taskbar

My main machine has an annoying issue... Every once in a while a box pops up in the Windows XP taskbar. It is the usual shape and size of the rectangle you get for any program, but there is no text or icon on it, and it lasts only a few seconds. I can not grab it or otherwise do anything to identify it. Has been like this for weeks...

Spybot, Ad-Aware, AVG, and a bunch of other apps see nothing wrong on the system, so I assume there is some service running like that.

Anyone have a clue on how to ID it, stop it, hide it?!? Thanks.

Cheese

BeerCheeze · Posted: Thu, 01 Jun 2006 20:13:54 Post Subject:

Check your scheduled task.

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 01 Jun 2006 21:01:32 Post Subject:

There are two entries related to nightly data backups... Scheduled for 3 and 4 AM.

Thats it.

T-shirt · Posted: Fri, 02 Jun 2006 07:15:16 Post Subject:

Have you tried running an event log?
it may not show up, but you'd think if it was something hidden by rootkit, the last thing they'd want is a toolbar flag.
it does sound like it might be timer, or event triggered.
Have you noticed any pattern to it's appearance?>

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Fri, 02 Jun 2006 07:21:58 Post Subject:

I just looked at the "Event Viewer". Is that what you mean? It has too many entries to look at, but I will keep an eye on it going forward. There are actually no entries for anything between noon and midnight yesterday, but I saw it pop up a few times last night!

One error in there was bout the system clock not being able to synchonize... I checked, and sure enough the clock was set to look on the web for updates. I don't usually use that, so I turned it off. But, it did say it was last synchronized 3 days ago, meaning it was working well after this problem started...

No patterns really. Sometimes nothing is running, sometimes I am busy on applications... It seems to be random.

BeerCheeze · Posted: Fri, 02 Jun 2006 08:39:48 Post Subject:

Take a look here and try the first 2 tools, that might let you find what it is.

There's a few others that might be useful too if one of those doesn't catch it.