SuzukiGSX1300R08
New Member
exec.exe. What is it and why does a box asking me for permission to let it run pop up every once in a while? I just got the comp today but now its annoying me.
You will want to read this blog for sure. The author ran into the same thing.
September 22, 2006
Did Windows Vista's most irritating feature save my butt?
Of all the new features in Windows Vista, few have drawn as much apprehension and scorn as the User Account Control. Designed to prevent malicious programs from taking action at the system level, it prompts users for permission to do things that wouldn't invoke a dialog box in earlier Windows versions.
I've not been a fan of it either . . . until today.
While working on my Vista-RC1-equipped home desktop this morning, my screen suddenly dimmed and a dialog box appeared. UAC was telling me that a program called exec.exe wanted to run. The dialog gave me several choices, including not to run it. I wasn unsure what this was, and I had not clicked on anything to launch a program, so I said no.
I then did a search on Google and discovered that exec.exe is one of two things: a component of the NetZero Internet-access service's software, or a part of the W32/Spybot-Z trojan.
Given that I've never installed NetZero on this machine, I have to presume that something was trying to install that trojan. Either that, or it was some kind of bizarre false-positive, which seems very unlikely.
I did a search on my PC for exec.exe and found nothing. A search on other computers on my network also came up empty, except for a reference to exec.exe in the form of a file in the Prefetch folder on another system. This was not the executable itself, mind you, but rather a .pf file, a kind of marker for programs that have been run in the past. But neither the registry nor the hard drive showed any evidence of that program ever having been in place, and antivirus and spyware scans came up clean, so I'm mystified.
I'll do more poking around later with some advanced tools.
But one thing I am happy about -- the enhanced security features in Windows Vista appear to have worked as advertised. http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2006/09/did_windows_vis.html