Windows 7: A program starts running whenever monitor is off

In the power settings, I set the monitor off time to 10 minutes.

When I get away from my computer more than 10 minutes, an invisible program starts running. It uses harddisk like crazy, and I also hear the CPU fan working faster.

I used "Process Explorer" to detect this program. I see a "svchost.exe" terminating in the last second as soon as I turn the monitor on by a mouse move or keyboard input. Unfortunately I am not able to see the parent process because it terminates immediately when the monitor turns on.



How can I detect this suspicious program?


(OS: Windows 7 Ultimate)

It might just be the Windows Indexing Service. Have you enabled or installed any "Folding at Home" software? That will use your computer for various number crunching tasks devoted to science during periods of no use. I'm not sure if ATI still has that "Folding" option when you install the drivers, but you may have installed it when you installed the ATI driver package. I've never installed it, but it's either a startup program or a service you can disable.

svchost runs dll's that otherwise wouldn't run, so check autoruns for startup programs.