Randomly opening/closing program

Name: Allison Hemmingway

Hi Tweaks guys, I have a question..

Some program opens and closes all the time in my taskbar! While I am working it will just pop open for a split second and then close! Nothing comes up on the screen and I don’t know what to do! Is it spyware or a virus? What do I do!!??

Well, first off I would update your virus/anti-spyware scanner and do a full system scan. These tend to take a while to run, so I’d recommend starting it before you go to bed, or before you’re about to go do something for a while that doesn’t involve the computer. If you can help it, boot to safe mode to do the scanning. Less stuff will be running; and it’ll usually make for an easier cleanup time if anything is found.

That said, it’s not necc. anything bad. If you have an HP scanner/printer combo (one of those all-in-one jobbies) then that’s more than likely the cause of it. I have an HP myself and for the longest time after I installed the software package my machine did exactly what you described. It’d randomly (every 15 min or so it seemed) have something appear on the taskbar and then it’d almost immediately go away.

I did a Start->Run->MSCONFIG and cleared most of the HP stuff out. This solved the problem.

You may not be able to use the printers on-board buttons like you should after that, because the software needs to be running in order for the computer to respond when you hit the “scan” button on the printer. Since I never use those buttons anyway I wasn’t too worried about it. I can still scan fine, so long as I tell the program that’s getting the scan to initiate it.

Give that a shot.