'Ghost' audio player in XP home? 1

[ricos0]

I have an annoying quirk that occurs intermittently in XP home: an audio track (actually one xmas tune I played from a CD last december) plays randomly with no player application running (when it's playing I look in Windows Task Manager where it shows no applications running). I have searched to no avail the hard disk for this music file so I can kill it. The only solution I've found so far is to mute system audio while the sucker plays over and over and over...

Evidently some startup task must be calling up this process in the background but So far I haven't been able to track it down. Any and all ideas from you brainstormers will be greatly appreciated!

 

[johnodq]

You could run MSCONFIG and see whats running and try disabling anything that your not sure about.

Have you checked event viewer to see what event might be triggering it.?

All I can suggest at the moment.

Please let me know if the advice I give is of use.

Johnodq

 

[ricos0]

Thanks for the tips. With MSCONFIG I was able to disble several likely processes, but still had the problem. Event viewer didn't show me anything suspicious, so I went back and disabled the entire list of Startup items, rebooted and voila - problem was gone. So I started enabling items on the Startup list and rebooting until the problem came back: it seemed to be attached to the 'WeatherBug' program. So apparently in the program options that annoying little tune had gotten assigned to be the replacement for the default audio sound to play when a weather alert occurs. So I simply reasigned back to the default sound in the program and it's fixed. Now if I can just get that damn tune to stop playing in my head...

By the way, as I was disabling start programs in MSCONFIG, I seem to have found a few others I can do without, so now I have to figure out how I can permanently drop them from the startup list. Any hints on a good way to locate and delete these guys? Also, isn't there a website that lists descriptions of all these filenames to help figure out if they are needed or not?

Thanks again...

 

[linney]

Spybot

http://security.kolla.de/

Ad-aware

http://www.lavasoft.nu

Will check your computer for spyware and adware.

 

[suds321]

i use startup cop. i think this is freeware by ziff-davis so try searching at zdnet.com and see what you can find

mike s