As of the past few weeks, when I start windows, A CMD window opens and stays open after all the programs and applications launch. I have just been exiting or closing the box, but I have been wondering what would cause it to open in the first place?
I have checked to see what is in start up (and I have been looking for CMD or RUN) but I don't see anything out of the ordinary.
How can I get this to stop?
I have windows 7 Home premium 64.
13 Answers
if it started suddenly first question would be did you install new software around that time or have thunderstorms etc.
If no new software was installed my first suspicion would be virus. scan with a good av program as well as spybot and malware bytes. If all 3 dont find any thing beyond cookies run scandisk to check the hdd for corruption. Check the system event logs for disk events after that. If more then a few warnings are found, or if errors are found for disk0 then its likely a bad hdd. after that all thats left is the startup items as mentioned by others.
I always start with worst case as its not unusual to catch a dying disk by chance that way ;) If new software was recently installed try uninstalling it and or use a restore point. some hard to fix viruses and odd things like this are repairable that way.
Use Autoruns instead of msconfig. It has a far more complete list of startup locations. Click Options > Hide Microsoft Entries, then check the remaining entries for CMD.EXE or scripts from which the command prompt may have been launched.
Depending on how it starts, but I'll start with the easy way...
Go to Start, type msconfig and press Enter. Select the Startup tab, and click Disable All. Click on Services, and tick the box for Hide Microsoft Services, then click Disable All. Click OK, then reboot. Does the box go away?
If yes, then go back into msconfig, and go back to the Startup tab. Enable half the times, hit OK and restart. Does the box stay away? If yes, repeat this step. If it comes back, then disable half the items you enabled, and reboot
If not, then it is starting up somewhere else, such as a service or a driver or a virus.
