When approaching my desktop from idle and the screen saver is on, I tap the space bar and see in the start tool bar a process tab that displays "3D testing" access the Windows Task Manager, and it was gone. What is this running? Is this the usual or spyware?
QUESTION POSED ON: 20 OCT 2005
QUESTION ANSWERED BY: Bob Konigsberg
It's hard to tell from just that phrase. Are you using one of the 3-D graphics screen savers (3-D Maze, Pipes, the floating, rotating text message, or any of the other 3-D rendered screensavers)?
Failing that, go to SysInternal.com (run by the nice folks Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell) and download a copy of Regmon and Filemon. Then run them overnight to see what activity is picked up. They also have a process monitoring tool, but I don't recall if it will keep a record of what has run and exited or not.
The only other possibility that comes to mind would be one of those "shared computing" applications where someone has set up that computer to allow its idle processing power to be used on a distributed problem. SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), Mapping the Human Genome project and a few others come to mind. There's also one out there that's involved in molecular construction of some sort, which might well use 3-D modeling techniques.
If a good antivirus package and Spybot Search and Destroy don't find it, also go and check your Control Panel applet for "Add/Remove Programs" just to see what all is actually installed on your computer.
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