What is running in my background?

[Jorden]

I'll give you a picture below.
I know what the GHCLIENT's are, I know the Idle time, I know what lots of them are...
What is an MPREXE.EXE? What is an STIMON.EXE?

What do you make of my system running at the moment? What should I lose, what should I disable at starting up?



Jord.

[fds]

stimon is the Still Image Devices Monitor. Do you have a scanner or a digital camera?

mpr afaik stands for Multiple Provider Router and is some networking stuff.

both are original parts of Windows.

The only thing you really should consider losing is Windows 9x/Me.

[arbymo]

wmiexe.exe is the windows managment interface which might be used by some reporting tools. Like "generate hardware log" in the mtstu.

I disabled it myself , rename wmiexe.exe to wmiexe.bak (from dos).

The reason i did this is that i found out it causes the mouse to display the waiting hourglass after bootup for a while, it was introduced with 98 SE.

[Jorden]

Yikes, I thought I had disabled Windows Management a long time ago.
Just did some checking, and I have it disabled. And it's still running ey?

I didn't even see that one in the list
The STIMON might be for my webcam.

Jord.

[arbymo]

Jorden
where did u disable windows managment ?? i can't find an appler for it anywhere !
i didn't even chose to install Web-Based Enterprise Managment, and wmi was still there.

It took me 2 days to figure out what was running on windows boot.
Strange thing is when u disable systray from registry, wmiexe.exe doesn't load up.

rubank
I didn't goto that extent though .. sure enough ur running after each bit of info in windows.

It really sucks when things happens without ur notice, or when they wanna know everything about users.
the new download style at microsoft is a STUPID DOG.
i miss the old download way where u can just browse through files and pick what you want.

[Jorden]

How I disabled WMI? I did Start->Run, type in msinfo32, OK (had a crash there, windows couldn't find MSVCRT40.DLL which I then copied from Win2k )

Goto Tools->WMI Control and disable just about everything you can find there.
I just don't think I really disabled WMI with that.

Jord.

[arbymo]

Jorden, thanks for the fast reply, but strangely i don't have WMI under tools in sysinfo !!

Myabee coz i didn't install it with windows, or maybee coz ur using Win ME, and i'm using 98 SE.

[rubank]

Guys,

I just noticed that after renaming wmiexe.exe wmi.dll still gets loaded, so now I have renamed even that file.
It has no apparent effect so far, everything
seems to work normally.

rubank

[Jorden]

rubank, which Windows are you running?

Sorry arbymo. Yes, I'm running WinME. I wouldn't have a clue where it would be in Win98SE.

Jord.

[omegaRED]

That Stimon.exe is a real pain in the a$$.

When i went to WinMe from Win98se, my PC locked up all the time. I tried everything. Reinstalled Windows 3 times. Uninstalled most of the progs. Nothing. Then, i installed CrashGuard, and found what the prob was. STIMON.EXE! CG fixed the lockups temporarily, but my PC still froze a half hour later.

In MSKB, i found why STIMON.EXE is for. Tried deleting it. Nothing. Finally i deleted ALL entries of it it the Registry Base. Finally, no more lockups or freezes. But now i cant us the buttons on my Umax Astra 2200USB. Small price to pay for stability.

------------------
Seth, are you ok ?
I`m peachy, Kate. The world is my oyster.

[rubank]

arbymo,

interesting what you write about wmiexe.exe, I had no idea.
A quick browse through it´s fellow, wmi.dll, reveals these disturbing entries among others:

LookupCookie, RequestAdress, RequestData, RegisterDataConsumer threw exception,

and stuff like that.
Makes me suspicious. I know Windows is storing a lot of info on your Internet activity in files you can´t even see while in Windows, they are carefully hidden but can be viewed in DOS if you know exactly where to look. Even if you have a utility to find them in Windows, you can´t delete them while Windows is running. I use good old DOSSHELL, from DOS 5.0, to look through and delete these files, hidden under Local Settings and Temporary Internet Files and possibly other places.
I refinanced my house, from one loan comp. to another, via Internet and later when checking these carefully hidden files I found the serial numbers on my old loans stored in there! What info might there be in encrypted form? And for what reason would Windows store this info, practically impossible for the individual user to see?
Note that these files will not go away if you under Internet settings clean up temp. files, disable cookies or delete "everything" in Temporary Internet Files.

Big brother is watching.

rubank

[Gurm]

If STIMON is causing system instability, then the real culprit is your scanner drivers. Sad but true.

- Gurm

P.S. Those of us using Win2k can selectively disable WMI by setting its service to "disabled".

------------------
Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Jon P. Inghram]

I found out a long time ago that having the scanner stuff in the background caused performace problems. That's why I made a little batch file that contains:

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\hpsjvxd.exe
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\STIMON.EXE

Then I just made shortcut to it, selected a nice scanner icon and put it on the desktop. Now whenever I want to scan I just run that first. BTW, this is with a HP 5100c and Win98.