Problem with task manager

Karl Hungus

It's odd, every time I press ctrl+alt+del to bring up the task manager, it almost instantly gets closed automatically...

Now this has been going on for some time, last couple of week at the least.

And I've also noticed, that when I try to bring up task manager again, a little green square appears in the systray, yet it dissapears if my mouse pointer goes near it.

I've no idea what this is, and what's going on. I found nothing searching about it on google. Both virus scans, and scans for adware have shown up nothing. All my scanning software is fully up to date, and I've run quite a few scans, and had a couple of updates since this problem started occuring.

Does anyone here know what on earth this is, and how to stop/fix it???

Chad ghostal

the little green box is part of task manager,
it disappears when you go near it with your mouse becuase the sys tray
refreshs and realises task manager is dead so removes it..

are you running XP?

use Dr watson to find out what else is running in the background at the time...

something might be killing/closing it..cant see why anything would ...

Karl Hungus

Dr Watson doesn't show anything either...

ColmOT [MSFT]

Does this also happen is you run taskmgr.exe from the Run command?

Karl Hungus

Yes, it does.

Capt'n Midnight

maybe check for viruses in safe mode
copy taskmgr.exe from another pc or expand from i386 and renaming it before running ?

The little square is supposed to be there - out of curiousity is it lime green (high cpu usage) or olive green (system idle)

Chad ghostal

iv googled here and there and the only thing that even resembles that,
is browser hijackers stopping taskmgr from coming up at all..

would a normal virus scan find browser hijackers?

check the registry to find out whats loading at boottime, to see if theres anything odd..


here are some suggestions for someone with a slightly similar problem..
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_20794843.html

Karl Hungus

Bollocks!!!

Whatever is closing task manager, seems to be closing the registry aswell everytime I try and open it.

Chad ghostal

start up in safemode to get at the registry. .
look in your system file for new and odd files (oddly named, odd creation dates - near when this started happening),
also check your windows directory for any odd files, hijackers usually have windows type names but are in odd casing or slightly mispelled..

try running spybot and hijackthis to get some more information...

Karl Hungus

I started up in safe mode, and I cannot get at the registry, or the task manager.
The same thing is happening.

Spybot didn't show up anything major either...

gurramok

Do the free online scanner at
pestscan

It would guarantee to catch any of the baddy virii type proggies that could be on your pc.

Capt'n Midnight

If the hijacker loads before the AV it can hide it's self.

Switch off the machine in case of a soft reboot.
restart in safe mode and try a scan there

or put the HDD into another PC as a slave drive and scan that way - then again the windows auto run will probably find some way to cross infect..

try autoruns / spybot / spywareblaster etc.
try zonealarm to see if anything is phoning home.

gurramok

Also check the msconfig file on startup tab, look for any suspicious processes on bootup, else post the lot of them here for scrutiny.