I noticed in my Win95 task list that there is an application called “Robot” which I don’t recall being there before. This is the task list you see when you hit Crtl-Alt-Del. I can end the Robot task, and I don’t notice anything changing, and nothing disappears from the System Tray. So I’m wondering where this program came from, what it does, and whether I can get rid of it. What caused me to look in the first place was that I was having some problems where my browser couldn’t find many web servers. It started with Opera, so I uninstalled Opera and re-installed it, and the problem moved to the Netscape browser.
It appears there each time I reboot. I have looked in the Registry, in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run and RunOnce, also similar keys in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, but I can’t find anything that loads something I don’t know about.
Is there a way to determine where the executable is? I assume that if I know the executable name, I can
I got a DSL line a couple of months ago, and recently I got a hardware gateway/firewall. So there were a few weeks where my PC was not entirely protected by a firewall, though I don’t think there were any listening sockets during that time, and I didn’t have NetBEUI enabled.
Robot is a program that I have seen on many name-brand PCs. I don’t know what its function, but I think it loads in System.ini on the load= or the run= line. Try that and see if that helps.
Find is one option, as mentioned. Add/Remove Programs is another. That’s in control panels, if you aren’t aware. You might also check your startup sequence.
Yes, I’m suspicious of a Trojan Horse program. There are no files on my system with “robot” in the name, other than the ones making up the Robotz sound scheme. Also, there is nothing in the registry containing the string “robot”, other than the Robotz sound scheme. And it’s not in the win.ini file either.
There is a program somewhere which is loading when Windows starts. The program idenitifies itself as “robot” when I do a Ctrl-Alt-Del, but the file name of the program is not “robot”.
What I would really like is a way to correlate the “robot” program that’s running to its file name. Then I can look through the registry for that file name if I want to kill it.
Robot is not a virus or trojan or anything like that. It is fairly common (I forget which brand…HP? Compaq?) program that I believe has something to do with winmodems. Sorry, but it’s been a few years since I quit AOL tech support. But that’s when I encountered it most often.
yeah, some programs do that, they install some program that reminds you to register. I am trying to install an HP CD writer and it also does it. One more piece of crap to run in the background. You can delete the program itself but I would also try to find where it is being launched and correct it. You should find it in one of the places already mentioned.