Unnecessary window sometimes pops up and hides in Windows 10

If you are working under Windows 10, you might notice a pop-up window that appears on the screen, and then instantly disappears. This can happen once a day, several times a day or even every hour (in fact, it should appear every hour, maybe you don’t always notice it). If you have seen this window, then you are not alone: ​​many other users have the same problem, which is indicated by the ten pages of discussion on the official Microsoft Answer forum.

The window quickly disappears, so it is difficult to understand why it arose and what process caused it. It is not clear why it appears and whether there are reasons for concern.

Users say that when a window appears, they are thrown out of full-screen mode if it is running in a program. For some, a window appears every hour, which prevents the games - the actual gameplay turns into a real nightmare due to such petty turmoil.
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The discussion began on April 15, 2017 with a question asked by the user rseiler . He had already figured out what the window was, what process caused it and how to hide it. But he was just wondering why the Microsoft program does not use any standard system method in order not to display the window of the working process on the screen.

Individual users shared their experiences when someone started the problem. One said that the window appeared as soon as he switched to the “fast cycle” of updates (fast ring). Another Office 365 user said that the window appeared after the last update around April 11th. They say that if you switch back to the “slow cycle” (slow ring), the mysterious window disappears by itself.

One of the victims filmed a window in a screencast.



The bottom line is that in the Microsoft Office Task Scheduler, two tasks are scheduled, which are performed at regular intervals:

OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerLogon is executed during user authorization
and
OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration , which is executed every hour.

Actually, that strange pop-up window belongs to the second OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration process, and you can watch it even every hour.

Both processes are set up to run in the Users group (Users). The easiest way to hide an annoying window out of sight is to set the OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration to run under the System account, and then you will no longer see pop-up windows every hour. To do this, call the Task Scheduler (Task Scheduler), go to the Task Scheduler Library> Microsoft> Office, right-click on OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration and select "Properties", then select "Change user or group" and specify system.

The user who advised this method of hiding OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration , recognizes that this is not the best option from a security point of view, but at least it temporarily solves the problem - clears the window from the screen, and in the future we can expect that Microsoft developers will release a patch that will fix this glitch

If you examine the log, you can see that the pop-up window is due to the officebackgroundtaskhandler.exe program, which is located at C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Microsoft Office \ root \ Office16 \ officebackgroundtaskhandler.exe. You can check this — run the file manually at any time and make sure that the Microsoft Office background task handler really displays a window for a moment.

Obviously, this process should not have pop-up windows, and Microsoft could find many ways to hide it, but this was not done for some reason.

One way or another, but instead of transferring to a system account, this process can be completely turned off. This is done in a similar scenario. You need to call the Task Scheduler (Task Scheduler), go to the Task Scheduler Library> Microsoft> Office, right-click on the OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration and turn off the process from there.



It is unclear what this particular process is doing. Based on its name, this is some kind of service process for handling tasks. In any case, if you decide to turn off, it is advisable to observe the behavior of Office. You never know, suddenly something breaks in him.