It appears on the lower right corner of my laptop running Windows 11. I shut it down and it reappears once a week or so. It’s been happening for a few weeks.
Google lens tells me it’s a “system notification stating that a connected printer has been detected and asking if you want to open the management tools.”
First thing I’d check is in your Printers setup if there’s anything you don’t recognize, and delete it if so.
Google Translate (from my phone, using the camera) translates the content of that as:
Did you install some kind of stamp- or printing-related software? The automatic translation is word salad, but it gives the impression of perhaps asking you to register the software.
But I can’t tell if that’s a system notification or just a box in the browser.
More instructions from Gemini on what to do:
Pasted from Gemini
What gives me pause is the language. I would generally expect legitimate software to be localized.
I would definitely go through a malware scan (e.g. with MalwareBytes) just to be sure you’ve not picked up anything nasty. Especially if you can’t think of any new software or peripherals you’ve installed recently.
It does look like some sort of printer addon malware/shovelware/bundleware.
If you can’t get rid of it the normal ways (startup apps, uninstall, malwarebytes), try to sic Claude Code or OpenAI Codex on it – the agentic harnesses in particular, not the bare chat bots. They’re very good at crawling your local computer and fixing obscure things by looking at system monitors and logs that are indecipherable to humans.
Just start a session, show it the screenshot, and have it search and destroy. If that doesn’t work, wait till the pop-up appears again and then try it (so it can see the executable in memory and back trace it from there).
Thanks all for the help.
I got a free trial of Malwarebytes as @BigT suggested and it found 20 things in the scan all categorized as PUP.optional.browserhijack which feels like it may have been what was going on.
It’s very similar to a different popup that I used to get from my HP Printer that was “legit” in that I do have an HP Printer and it was asking something reasonable in English. I have had the printer for many years. I just cycled the printer and it didn’t show up.
I got a similar result that @TroutMan did and tried to do that stuff but it didn’t work which could be user error on my part.
I recently upgraded my fiber internet and switched routers from EERO 6Es to EERO Pro 7s. I’d be surprised if that was the cause.
Let’s hope it’s fixed. If not I’ll go to @Reply 's method.
Thanks to everyone for taking the time to help me.
Well hell. It came back so I tried this.
Hajaro, do you use a VPN? I get spam, ads, and messages in other languages if my VPN has been connected to those countries.
I don’t use a VPN. Thanks though