Console window keeps popping up

Question

I keep seeing a console window pop up for a fraction of a second every couple of hours. Seems random, I can't pin it to any one particular event. Is there any way I can trap the window and see what it's doing?

I'm on Win 10, latest updates, Norton.

Answer 1

Did some further investigation and considering the fact the first time I've noticed, Office Click to Run was active, I have the suspicion that this is indeed the issue also described here on Reddit:

Yesterday I noticed something weird at my Desktop PC, CMD popped up with an hour between, exactly, but it disappeared again too fast for me to have any chance of seeing what the title is, or if there's any text, or anything, in fact I'm not 100% sure it's CMD, but it has the shape and color. I thought this was a specific program doing it, so I went through the event viewer, unable to find anything, but just gave up there.

Today on my Laptop, an hour after turning it on, the excact same thing happened to me, though Chrome and Spotify were running on both PC's I believe it has something to do with Windows... If anyone knows anything about it, please help, because it's annoying as hell to be tabbed out of your game, or concentration because of such a little thing.

So it seems several Reddit users noticed the same problem and they've come to a similar conlusion as me:

I went to the Task Scheduler > Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft > Office and found and disabled "OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration"

So I checked my Scheduled Tasks, opened the Microsoft and Office categories and indeed the OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration task ran the exact moment I've noticed the popup the last time.

Running the task by hand led to the exact same result: a console window popping up for a split second.

So guess Microsoft changed something in the program ran for this task. You can probably disable the task for now, although I don't know whether there's any impact on doing so.

Answer 2

SOLUTION: Run Task Scheduler > Microsoft > Office > Right click "OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration" > Disable.

Here's an image of the location I created in case you need extra help:

Answer 3

This solution might be a bit hackey, but I had a similar issue once so I recorded my screen with the slowmo feature of my phone. I was actually able to pause the video at a frame that showed the console window and figured out that it was just a silly Easteregg of a game I had, but it worked!

Answer 4

Since you understand the code and assuming can read the stack trace, look at Sys internal tools especially Process Monitor. It lets you look at the file system calls, registry checks etc., so you can find which process is creating console and take necessary actions.

You can filter API calls by using Filter option of the tool, can even save the state or reduce the capture by restricting it to cmd.exe or any application.

Here is a nice tutorial of all things you can do with Process Monitor.