New
#1
Process Explorer Question: Odd Path?
Hi everyone. Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this question, but I thought I might as well ask here.
A lot of the time I use Sysinternal's Process Explorer. Usually when running process explorer, hovering the mouse over a process shows both its list of services, and also the path from which that process is running. Typically I see "C:\{whatever}", which is what I'd expect.
This morning something peculiar happened while I was watching my computer boot up. A process named 'WMIADAP.exe' started to run (I think it was daughter to svchost, but I'm not sure). I know WMIADAP.exe is typically considered a legit program, but the copy on my harddrive isn't what's worrying me so much as the path of the one Process Explorer saw running. It only stayed running for a moment or two before closing itself, but I still managed to get the tooltip in that time. The path for this process was listed as below:
\\?\C:\Windows\System32\wbem\WMIADAP.exe
Now, I'm not sure what "\\?\C:\" means as a path, but my gut feeling is that it's a remote, network, or hidden drive, and not my hard drive, that this program is running from. Can anyone provide any insight, please, on why process explorer would list such a peculiar path name? For the record, I'm using the latest process explorer on Windows 7 Professional. Thanks!