I got an email from my dad this week wondering if I knew “What in the world is this message that keeps coming up every time we start Mom’s computer? It began appearing right after I inserted the removable hard drive to do the most recent backup.” He attached the following screen shot from Windows XP which pretty much speaks for itself (as much as such a thing can):

To be honest, I’ve never heard of it. No Disk? Exception Processing Message? What on earth … I did a web search or two and came up with several fairly recent threads on every tech support site out there … none of which had anything resembling an authoritative answer.

My best guess from the DaniWeb and TechGuy threads is that there is some media app running on startup, but I’ve already had them disable everything in their MSConfig startup tab without getting rid of this annoying message which takes multiple clicks to actually go away.

I had them bring up Task Manager and determined that the message window seems to be owned by the csrss.exe process … apparently it’s only started happening recently after a reboot when my dad switched out the removable hard disks they have been using for backups for years … seems like maybe it’s a recent Windows update but at this point I have no idea, so I guess I’ll try poking around when I get over to their house next time. Anyone have any ideas?