Identifying an application that doesn't display its name

[Richard]

Every so often on my PC (a few times every day, and at seemingly random
times) a window title appears on the taskbar and then disappears very
quickly. The application's name isn't displayed, it's just an "empty"
taskbar button. No actual application window is displayed and it appears
for less than a second.

I'm trying to determine what process is actually doing this, but I'm
stumped as to how to actually work it out;

- It appears and disappears too quickly for me to fire-up Task Manager or
Process Explorer (from System Internals).

- I've disabled my anti-virus software in case it was an auto-update being
called by a scheduler, but that's not it.

- I've looked through Services and can find nothing I don't recognise.

- I've done a full anti-virus and spyware sweep but it reported all OK.

- I've looked in the Event Viewer for any clues and found nothing.

Is there an application that will actually LOG every process that starts
and stops (with a time stamp of course!) so that the next time I see it
happen I can fire up the application's log viewer and see what's just
started and stopped?

Thanks for any suggestions!

Richard.

 

[Jon]

Filemon may provide sufficient clues to be able to identify it
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html

--
Jon

Prevention is better than cure

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that "Richard"