Solved Blink-and-you-miss-it windows appearing randomly

cbiweb · May 2, 2023

The only way to describe the issue is every now & then, randomly, there's a micro-second flash of another window on the screen. It's not full screen, and there's no way to tell what's in the window, if anything. It's super fast, almost imperceptible.

Anyone else experience this or what might be causing it? Am I being spied on by the government?

TM21 · May 2, 2023

Step one, for me, would be to open up 'Task Manager' and see what's running, then disable everything that you don't absolutely NEED to have starting up when you boot up your PC. ReBoot!
After rebooting, if that mystery 'flash' reappears, you'll have to look deeper.

Do you have any third party Anti Virus program installed?

Josey Wales · May 2, 2023

I get that as well.

sgage · May 2, 2023

Josey Wales said:
I get that as well.

I do, too. It seems like a terminal window. I just figure it's some Windows housekeeping thing going off.

jbcarreon123 · May 2, 2023

sgage said:
I do, too. It seems like a terminal window. I just figure it's some Windows housekeeping thing going off.

I also get them. It also looks like a conhost window.

TM21 · May 2, 2023

I don't get it! I've installed windows 11/Pro/64 at least 15 times now, over that past 10 months, and I've never seen anything like that.
I can only surmise that y'all done somethin' wrong!
But I promise, if I ever see that on any of my xx Win-11 PC's, it will get a Clean Install immediately.
A nice Clean Install can fix a multitude of problems.

Cheers Mates!
TM

cbiweb · May 2, 2023

TechnoMage2021 said:
I don't get it! I've installed windows 11/Pro/64 at least 15 times now, over that past 10 months, and I've never seen anything like that.
I can only surmise that y'all done somethin' wrong!

I'm on a laptop that came with 11, so it's nothing I did.

Bree · May 2, 2023

TechnoMage2021 said:
I don't get it! I've installed windows 11/Pro/64 at least 15 times now, over that past 10 months, and I've never seen anything like that.
I can only surmise that y'all done somethin' wrong!

I get it on some machines, but not on others. It seems to be a cmd window that briefly flashes at start up when machine-specific drivers are first loaded.

cbiweb · May 2, 2023

Bree said:
I get it on some machines, but not on others. It seems to be a cmd window that briefly flashes at start up when machine-specific drivers are first loaded.

I get it long after startup. Not every day, and sometimes twice in one day, hours apart.

Steve C · May 3, 2023

I believe this happens whenever OneDrive is updated

john1955 · May 3, 2023

cbiweb said:
The only way to describe the issue is every now & then, randomly, there's a micro-second flash of another window on the screen. It's not full screen, and there's no way to tell what's in the window, if anything. It's super fast, almost imperceptible.

Anyone else experience this or what might be causing it? Am I being spied on by the government?

This has been happening with my Windows 7 for a couple of months now. It (maybe) only happens in my browser so I was thinking it might be my popup blocker. I noticed it just once (so far) watching a YouTube video in Win-10. I think it's almost always watching YouTube but I do that a lot so I cant remember if it ever happened anywhere else. I wish there was a way to trace it down.

cbiweb · May 4, 2023

Marking this as solved, since it seems to be a normal (whatever that means) part of whatever Windows is doing behind the scenes.
But if anyone happens to know the exact cause, feel free to chime in. Thanks for everyone's input!

YaklDakl · Jan 25, 2026

cbiweb said:
The only way to describe the issue is every now & then, randomly, there's a micro-second flash of another window on the screen. It's not full screen, and there's no way to tell what's in the window, if anything. It's super fast, almost imperceptible.

Anyone else experience this or what might be causing it? Am I being spied on by the government?

it can be so many things. for me i found that i had set a IFEO debug key for UserOOBEBroker.exe to C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe. So every-time it tried to run i got the flash. i ended up just renaming it and all is quiet.

BarryGuff · Jan 25, 2026

You could use the free mode of AlomWare Toolbox with its Map tab to see the source of what's opening (https://www.alomware.com/images/tab-map.png). Anything that flashes to the front should get picked up by it (unless it's really as fast as you say).

hsehestedt · Jan 25, 2026

I see this on every single Windows 11 machine (and back on 10 as well) I ever touch. It is very infrequent and always a command prompt window, usually an app looking for updates or something like that. I believe that some of these are triggered by tasks in the task scheduler, but I have not hunted this down in detail.

EDIT: When I notice this in the future, I'll see if the time matches anything in Task Scheduler.

Steve C · Jan 26, 2026

See my post 10 - it's probably OneDrive updating

cheaterslick · Jan 26, 2026

I haven't experienced it but it sounds and looks creepy.

I wonder if (temporarily) disabling OneDrive and cutting back on the tasks running in Task Scheduler would make them go away.

john1955 · Jan 26, 2026

Steve C said:
See my post 10 - it's probably OneDrive updating

It also happens in Windows 7 that does not have One Drive but if you look at Task Scheduler there are some apps that update every hour for one day once triggered and some are triggered at a specific time of day and then every hr after that for one day.

Simply disabling OneDrive's scheduled task would be one way to test it. If you have the time you can try as many as you can find with that type of schedule. Whatever it is it's something I disabled on Win-7 that I'm not using on Win-11 because I have not seen it yet in Win-11 but I dont use One Drive but Edge has the same task frequency if I remember correctly so test that as well.

Ed Tittel · Jan 27, 2026

I was sure I had blogged about this at one point, but I can't find the post. I dimly remember using the NirSoft tool TaskSchedulerView lets you search all tasks in one go. There's some kind of search that will turn up the command prompt in use, but no longer recall those details. OK found an item from 2016 entitled Take control of Windows tasks with TaskSchedulerView but I had to go to the Wayback machine to find an online version. So far, so good. But can't remember the trick I used to get it to search for tasks that involved running cmd.exe. Anybody got clue?
Thanks,
--Ed--

YaklDakl · Jan 27, 2026

Ed Tittel said:
I was sure I had blogged about this at one point, but I can't find the post. I dimly remember using the NirSoft tool TaskSchedulerView lets you search all tasks in one go. There's some kind of search that will turn up the command prompt in use, but no longer recall those details. OK found an item from 2016 entitled Take control of Windows tasks with TaskSchedulerView but I had to go to the Wayback machine to find an online version. So far, so good. But can't remember the trick I used to get it to search for tasks that involved running cmd.exe. Anybody got clue?
Thanks,
--Ed--

use elevated powershell:
Get-ScheduledTask | Where-Object { $_.Actions.Execute -match "cmd.exe" } | Select-Object TaskName, TaskPath

This will give you arguments:
Get-ScheduledTask | Where-Object { $_.Actions.Execute -match "cmd.exe" } | Select-Object TaskName, @{Name="Command";Expression={$_.Actions.Execute}}, @{Name="Arguments";Expression={$_.Actions.Arguments}}

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