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I have a Dell 3010 desktop with Win 7 hard-wired (Ethernet port) through a Buffalo Air Station (inside) and a Verizon-provided Westell router connected to what Verizon laughably calls "high speed internet". Off and on for the past several months I have had a medium-sized image appear on my screen that consists of a monochrome gray outlined globe with three stars or satellites on the left and an "X" in a circle at lower right. If I run my cursor over the bottom of the image, a rectangular "OK" button in darker gray appears, but it is inactive. This image evidently has the "always on top" attribute, and cannot be dragged with the mouse, so it regularly gets in the way of my reading the display. I have attached a screen capture showing the image, hopefully that works. I did considerable searching, and found some opinions stating this image (banner, whatever) is a native Windows alarm indicating an internet connection error. While the bandwidth provided by VZ is execrable, it seems to be working as intended, so there does not appear to be an actual error. The image will appear for several days, disappear for a week or two, then return. Any suggestions on how to get rid of it? If I cannot do that, can anyone provide me with the name and location of the source image file in Windows, so that I can attempt to overwrite it with a less obtrusive (hopefully, single pixel) image? Thanks for any help.

So a reverse Google image search and a TinEye reverse image search yields nothing except in Google there was a Reddit (stupid name) user with the same thing some three days ago. Was that you?

So I need some information here.

1) Is this showing up in browser or straight on the computer?

2) Run Autoruns, go to File and save the ARN file. Zip the ARN file and upload here. Autoruns for Windows - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs

3) Run Sanity Check downloaded from here: Resplendence Software - Free Downloads

4) Do you have bridging mode turned on in the Buffalo router? If you have some Verizon software installed or even Buffalo software installed and you have a double NAT it could be complaining (with that image) with a poorly written piece of software letting you know of the issue. To confirm whether you have a double NAT go to the start orb and in search enter cmd. Now in command prompt enter tracert 8.8.8.8 If the first two resulting IPs are local intranet IPs, then you have a double NAT configuration. If you do have a double NAT configuration, this still may or may not be your image issue. It could be malware of some type.

No, you don't just want to find the source of the image and make it a 1x1 pixel. That's just glossing over the issue. We want to find the source of the problem. And if I were sitting there I could find it.

Ran Autoruns64 & autorunsc64. Couldn't quickly figure out how to extract the ARN file (probably right in my face/too obvious) or pipe to another format, but I did use the VirusTotal option and I reviewed the results in detail. Every found item was "verified" as legit by AR and recognized by me; no item was flagged by VT. Sanity Check flagged only a PIA VPN monitor running, also expected. The tracert one-hopped to an external PSI Net IP, took two more hops among PSI Net addresses, then jumped to Google World addresses (two more prior to Google DNS - 8.8.8.8) Once the image is triggered, it appears over the local DT as well as in the browser, but is always triggered during browser use (nothing novel there imo). Right now, I'm leaning toward the Buffalo AS drivers as probably culprit, as they have not been updated in approximately forever. Also, I have a Win 7 LT that connects via WIFI, and when connected to the Buffalo it occasionally shows the yellow "!" in the network tray, even though drilling down to the Buffalo entry shows adequate connectivity. Seems fairly analogous to seeing the image on the DT. If you think further examination of the Windows environment itself is indeicated at this juncture, I should probably flag this incident closed. Thoughts?

I isolated it. Just for S&G, before I shut down that last session, I began closing out non-Windows services. When I closed the Avira AV system tray, the image disappeared. I'll now take this up with Avira support. Thanks for your help.

The actual exe is "Avira.Spotlight.UI.Application.Messaging.exe". Avira forums show several show several user issues involving it, but nothing but brain-dead answers. Time for a new AV, i guess...

I've talked extensively on this here and here. I should do a write up on my forum.