Browsers starting up at boot up

Thank you for the reply. I tried Kaspersky and it did not show anything. I will try it again and then I will use those tools in the link. I never tried the Avira one and that one I have. I need to pry that laptop from them so I can just run all these scans without interruption.

In the clean boot I did the first step, once it rebooted and got to the desktop I did Ctrl+Alt+Del and it was running so I stopped there for now as we ran out of time to do more; again why I want that laptop in my hands.

If I can get my hands on it (even if I can convince them not to take it with them) I will run as many boot scans as possible and then finish out the Adwcleaner too. I'll report back, but that is if I can pry it away.

Just an update, since the Christmas time is here next to impossible to get with my friends. But noticed something. In my Windows XP machine; if I launch Internet Explorer it too has two sessions. But in my case when I close it both sessions go away.

I went to my three Windows 7 machines and they do the same thing; two sessions. If I check and uncheck the "Show processes from all users" no difference.

So is this something new? I don't use Internet Explorer as much as I do Firefox and Firefox is just one session. But back to my case here, in my tests of my machines both Windows XP and 7 machines; all have two sessions open. When I close Internet Explorer they both go away, but in the case with my friend one session stays active.

Now I did run scans and nothing is popping up and I am now wondering if it is the system itself and not a virus. Still just guessing though, someday I'll get my hands on it. Just keeping you guys in the loop.

This is my Windows 7 which is the same on all 6 systems. Some are Home and others are Professional; all are 64-bit



This is showing up as I am on a Google search page.

Just checked 3 XP machines, 1 is a virtual for testing. Same thing, except no *32 at the end. Just iexplore.exe

I did notice something too; the largest consumer of memory closes first, then the smaller one if that makes any difference. But my systems are all SSD so they close pretty fast.

I also tried starting I.E. with add-ons disabled, same deal; two sessions

Going to see if I can check on some of my client systems today. I know this is off base for what my original thread was, start another one for this?

So if I get this straight, the larger memory user IE is the actual program and then the smaller entry one is the only tab open when IE is launched.

Thanks, just weird since I am use to one entry for a program like Firefox.

AirPower4ever said:

So if I get this straight, the larger memory user IE is the actual program and then the smaller entry one is the only tab open when IE is launched.

Thanks, just weird since I am use to one entry for a program like Firefox.

Since you have brought XP into the discussion, the answer to your inquiry is a tiny bit more complex:

I don't happen to be on a system with an XP VM right now, so I cannot check for sure what happens for IE7; but with IE8 on W7, one 32bit parent process starts (it does not show a window that you can see). This parent process launches a second 32bit child process. The child process does the actual surfing and it is the window that you see. If you open a new tab and if that tab is set to open a blank page or new tab page (i.e. not set to open a home web page), then you probably will not see another 32bit instance of iexplore launch. The number of tabs that can be supported by each IE child process depends on what each tab is displaying. Here are 5 IE8 tabs supported by one IE parent and two IE children:



The parent process handles crash recovery (among other things). It keeps track of what each tab is showing you. Notice that the RAM usage is pretty much the same for each IE instance. Once the children start displaying websites, their RAM usage will go up considerably. The parent's RAM usage should grow, but not all that much.

With IE9 on W7, you could have the same 32bit parent and several 32bit children. Again, the number of IE children depends on the complexity of each tab. Also with IE9 on W7, you could have one 64bit parent and several 64bit children.... it all depends on which version of IE9 you started.

Starting with IE10 (on a 64bit OS), the parent process will always be 64bit*. On W7, the children will be 32bit by default. You can make the children be the safer 64bit processes using this info.

*If you manually open the 32bit IE10 or IE11 as the parent process on a 64bit OS, it will start the 64bit version as the parent and then just end the 32bit parent.


Here is IE11 and 5 empty 64bit tabs:



Again, the RAM usages is pretty much even, but once the children do the the work of showing a website, they will probably start using more RAM than the parent. The order that these processes appear in task manager depends on how you have task manager sorting the columns and which process id (PID) number that each process happens to get. If you are sorting by image name, then task manager settles the tie by listing the lowest PID first (even if the PID column is not showing).