White Box appearing!

[lizziet]

Hi, This is my first post and I'm hoping someone can help me! I use windows vista on my laptop and everytime I log in a white box appears at either 5 past or 35 past the hour. The white box stays in the background but appears in front of all my programs every half an hour. If I click or right click on it nothing happens, and it's not coming up as anything when I look in the task manager.

Could it be from any programs I installed and can I get rid of it? Please help!!
http://i751.photobucket.com/albums/xx157/lizzietheirishgal/Whitebox.jpg

I screenied it.

[lizziet]

Sorry should have mentioned, I have a Dell inspiron 1318. I'm not sure how much RAM etc. it has, I'm a bit of a technology dummy!

[Allan]

Go to START - RUN and type msconfig (press ENTER). On the general tab choose Diagnostic Startup and reboot. Does the white box continue to appear? Let us know and we'll give you the next steps to take.

[lizziet]

Thanks for your reply. The box didn't appear when I was in the diagnostic start up but when I went back into the normal start up it appeared again.

[Allan]

Okay. Download Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel. Run it. Uncheck all startup items on all tabs and reboot. Does the box appear?

[lizziet]

Sorry when you say reboot does that mean I run the diagnostic start up again? I'm sorry I just don't have a great understanding of computers!

[Allan]

No, just uncheck all the startup items with Startup Control Panel and restart the machine.

[lizziet]

Ok when I try to uncheck everything it says "There is already an enable/disabled item with this name. Please rename enabled or disabled item" e.g when I disable bluetooth, it unchecks it but then bluetooth appears below it, checked. I can't disable the second bluetooth. This happens with everything I uncheck. Is it supposed to?

Sorry again to be so annoying!

[Allan]

Just uncheck those items you can.

[lizziet]

Ok I did that and the box is still appearing

[Allan]

Okay. You can put checks back in the startup items now.

You're not going to like this, but here goes. When we did the diagnostic startup in msconfig we disabled pretty much everything from starting. The box did not appear. When we kept the startup items from loading it did. So what you can do is the following:

1) Open msconfig
2) Choose "selective startup " (uncheck everything)
3) Start adding items back one at a time, rebooting after each, until the problem recurs. You will then know which process is causing the problem

It's a lengthy, time consuming process, but it may be the best way.

Just one other thing you can try first though. Run full scans with both your anti virus utility AND MalwareBytes just in case it's some form of malware. If it is, we can avoid the msconfig process.

[BC_Programmer]

Or we can find out what process the white box belongs to.

One program that can help is Microsoft Spy++... MS took the download link down a while ago but I still have it:

here

Just unzip it somewhere, and run spyxx.exe; (or spyxx_amd64 if you are running a 64-bit version, but the 32-bit version works in either one anyway).

If you get an error about the application configuration being incorrect, you'll need the Visual C++ 2008 redistributable:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9b2da534-3e03-4391-8a4d-074b9f2bc1bf&displaylang=en


Once you've managed to start it, and you have the white box, you'll need to do the following:



1. select from the menu "Spy->Find Window"

drag the "finder tool" icon over the white box, and release.

Click "OK" in the finder tool dialog.

you should get a "Window properties" dialog. Ignore the gibberish and select the "process" tab, and click the underlined "process ID" value.


The "Module name" item here will reflect the base filename (usually) of the program that is creating the mystery white box; this can help guide you as to which startup items to select and not select.

Then again, it might be faster to just go with Allan's advice and just work through each one progressively; I just thought I'd throw in an alternative.

[lizziet]

Thank you. I used the spy program and I now know the name of the program running the white box. I can't find it anywhere, so I don't know how to shut it off. It's called "dellcommunications"_BCONTWNDCLASS_dellcommsbigbcont.

Is there any way to disable it?

[Allan]

Go back to Mike Lin's Startup Control Pane. Do you see any entries from Dell? If so, please post the name(s) here.

[lizziet]

There is a dell comms in HKLM/Run tab. That's probably it. But when I disable it, another dell comms appears below it and it won't let me disable that.