Win 7 Task Manager Process ID problem

I'm running Windows 7 on both a laptop (Home Edition) and desktop (Pro Edition) and have noticed that when I open Task Manager that there a a couple of processes (csrss.exe, winlogon.exe) that don't have an identifiable User Name or Description. Also, if I right click to locate the path or open the properties window, nothing happens. Is is possible that these have been infected by a virus or trojan? Both PCs seem to be running fine with no performance issues, but I'm nervous that these processes can't be identified.

jpwilli3 said:

I'm running Windows 7 on both a laptop (Home Edition) and desktop (Pro Edition) and have noticed that when I open Task Manager that there a a couple of processes (csrss.exe, winlogon.exe) that don't have an identifiable User Name or Description. Also, if I right click to locate the path or open the properties window, nothing happens. Is is possible that these have been infected by a virus or trojan? Both PCs seem to be running fine with no performance issues, but I'm nervous that these processes can't be identified.

What do you mean they can't be identified? Do you mean they just don't have a username associated with them?

Could you post a screenshot to show us exactly what you're seeing?

See attachment of screen capture. My anti-virus and spyware software is Panda AVPro and it hasn't identified a problem.

Click the button on the bottom that says "show processes from all users". I think you'll find that you have a lot of processes like that without a particular username associated, which doesn't necessarily mean it's malware.

This doesn't rule out malware, but doesn't immediately insinuate it is either. You might want to just boot into safe-mode and do a virus-scan in case.

Thanks, FliGi7, your suggestion worked! Still not sure why all the info wasn't listed for the processes on the short list, but now all the column info is showing and for many more processes. I see there's a lot of seeming redundacies; e.g. csrss.exe is listed twice and svchost about 16 times. But at least the ones I checked all seem to have legitimate file locations so I feel better. Also, running malwarebytes didn't indicate any problems with these processes.

Glad to help.

I know it might be a bit late, but I have the same problem as jpwilli3. I have Windows Task Manager start minimized when Windows start (using WinPatrol), but some processes are missing their Description (and presumably Usernames, but I removed that column). This is on a new and clean Windows 7 Professional 64-bit installation. I am 99% sure that this isn't virus related, since it has been this way from the beginning.
I previously had Windows 7 Pro 32-bit on my old laptop, but I never had this problem.
I did notice that if I exit the task manager and reopen it, all the descriptions are loaded. This led me to believe that perhaps a Windows service has not started yet, so on a new restart I opened services.msc immediately to see which services have not started yet. However, when I opened services.msc, all the descriptions in task manager show, once I opened it.

So, in conclusion, when task manager is started for the first time, the process descriptions aren't showing. When I close and reopen it, they show. If I open services.msc and then start task manager, they show.

Does anyone have any suggestions whatsoever? Do any other people have this problem?

Also, sorry for the long post.

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