When I right-clicked on it to try to determine its location by clicking on "Open file location", that option was grayed-out.
With the Windows regedit program, I checked
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run,
and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce,
but found nothing that looked amiss in those two locations. So I ran
the Sysinternals progam
autoruns. The program was written by Mark Russinovich and Bryce
Cogswell, whose company, Winternals Software LP and
Sysinternals website
was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Looking under the Logon tab,
I saw an entry under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
was highlighted in yellow, indicating there was a problem with it.
Autoruns indicated that the file pointed to by the entry could not be found. In this case the value name and value data that were problematical were the following ones:
| Value name: | Wondershare Helper Compact.exe | |
| Value data: | C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Wondershare\Wondershare Helper Compact\WSHelper.exe |
Not only did the file not exist on the system, there was not even a
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Wondershare\ directory.
When I unchecked the box next to "Wondershare" in autoruns, the entry immediately disappeared from the startup list in the Task Manager. If I rechecked the check box, the "Program" entry immediately reappeared in the startup list in the Task Manager. So, apparently, Windows will put "Program" in the list shown from the Startup tab in Task Manager, if a file associated wtih a "run" registry entry doesn't exist on the system.
Created: Monday January 19, 2015