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Icon flashing in taskbar

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by brianaaa12 1 view

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For about the last several days, about once every 15 minutes an icon briefly flashes in my task bar. It appears to be the same color as Outlook's icon but it flashes so quickly I'm never looking directly at it when it flashes.

I've checked task manager and Outlook isn't running. It's as quick as a snap of the fingers. I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium and my task bar is setup so running apps are the small squares and that is what is flashing.

I've scanned my PC for viruses and am very cautious about the websites I go to and am fairly certain I don't have any infections. Although we can never completely rule that out.

Does anybody perhaps have an idea what this might be?

6 replies

by santeewelding

I'm assuming that when you say, Taskbar, you refer to the right side.

by brianaaa12

Nope...I'm referring to the regular taskbar, over on the left next to the quick launch. I have it set to small, icon only so my running apps show up as a small square (not rectangle). This is where it flashes. I did manage to time it last night and it was close to 10 minutes between flashes. I also noticed that when it flashed, my mouse pointer went to the round, "busy" donut thing. I'll keep watching. Thanks,

by seanferd

check to see what Outlook might be scheduled to do every 10 minutes.

Or get on with profiling or tracing as suggested by cmatthews.

by seanferd

which is that you are referring to the system tray/notification area - and icon ever displayed in there will show up if you look by expanding the tray. You may need to enable "show unused icons", but I can't recall if that is necessary in 7.

It may be Outlook checking for new messages on a schedule?

by cmatthews

..since you've been here a while, you likely know about MS-TechNet. Start it and hit the magnifying glass to stop the event tracer. Go to filter and select the first rule, click remove many times to remove all includes. After, add these two includes "operation is process start" and "operation is process exit". Now click the magnifying glass again to start the log.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

Note: As on most sysinternals tools, right-click the columns to add more detail in the logs. Cheers!

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