Unknown Icon

[cotners]

Does anyone know what this icon in my taskbar is? It goes away when I try to touch it with my mouse pointer.

It's the red icon to the far left.

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a12...scape/Icon.jpg

Thanks in advance.

[Esvedium]

Usually when you roll your mouse over a system tray icon and it goes away, it's something that has stopped running. If you open something like outlook, it puts a little outlook icon down there. If you go to task manager and kill the outlook.exe process, the icon will stay down in your systray until you roll over it, at which point it disappears.

I have no idea what that icon is for. Does it show up right when you log in after a reboot? If so, does it go away the first time you roll over it then?

Take a look in your startup folder and in the registery (if you're comfortable with the registry) to see what is running at start up, both for whatever you're logging in as and the "all users" startup.

[Kohan]

Does anyone know what this icon in my taskbar is? It goes away when I try to touch it with my mouse pointer.

Although I can't answer as to what the icon is, I can see that you're using AVG, which isn't as good as it used to be. Fortunately, you also have SpyBot, and that's excellent. I highly recommend replacing your anti-virus with Avast!, as AVG is a big, clunky mess nowadays compared to the attractive free program it used to be.

http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

You might be familiar with HijackThis, which lists everything that runs during startup. The above poster suggested viewing your startup by other means (probably MSConfig and then the registry itself), but HijackThis simplifies that. Run it and see if you notice anything suspicious, and/or feel free to post the log here.

Aside from SpyBot (which sometimes misses spyware here and there), I suggest downloading and trying Malwarebytes, and seeing if it finds anything for you:

http://www.download.com/Malwarebytes...-10804572.html

If nothing turns up, then it may very well be some sort of proprietary application related to some of your hardware that only needs to run briefly. However, you'd probably remember if you installed something recently and would already be aware of that.