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


I meant I had to go back to the Wayback Machine to find the story I'd written, not the tool itself. Obviously that wasn't clear: but it does give me a chuckle. All I can say is "it made sense to me at the time." Still chuckling...
Thanks to YaklDakl who did provide a search string to dig that up. Much-appreciated. I'd advise the OP to give it a try on his system in an elevated PowerShell session to see if anything useful turns up. Cheers!
--Ed--
 

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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).
I don't think this helps at all. AlomWare is displaying the MRU (Most Recently Used) list of apps and folder locations.

The mystery black screens are background processes not running as you, so they don't get added to the MRU.
 

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When I use it, it shows info on whatever window gets the focus, so maybe the black flashing is too fast for it to be mapped. :(
 

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Another thing that has worked for me in the past is to run a filtered ProcMon log where i take note of the windows flash time and correlated it with the procmon log times.
 

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A lot of query's, depending on your wording, point toward Office background operations.
I've disabled Startup Boost in Word and haven't seen a flash since.
Could be coincidence, but, I'll monitor it.

12040.webp
 

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Another thing that has worked for me in the past is to run a filtered ProcMon log where i take note of the windows flash time and correlated it with the procmon log times.
ProcMon is not a relatively inexpensive process to leave running in the background.

A better strategy is to enable audit logging of Windows process creation, and filter out the event logs for CMD or PowerShell instances. The benefit is you can get the calling arguments (which parent process launched the window, and what the command line was).
 

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Download the free Sysinternals Autoruns. This will show you all apps that start with Windows.
You can disable or uninstall any apps that you do not recognize that start with Windows.
 

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