Today's first crapware kill is hpmsgsvc.exe, This is an HP program, not Micro$oft. Web searching returned a lot of hits, but few of the hits actually knew anything about hpmsgsvc. It's been around for a good while. Fair number of hits talked about troubles back in Windows 7, where hpmsgsvc would go crazy and hog all the available CPU time. The few knowledgeable hits say the hpmsgsvc is a kludge that lets you "hook" a program to a function key so that you can start that program for just touching one key. Why anyone would want to do that, it's an ancient DOS idea, is unclear. If I want to set a program for easy start, I just put its icon (a shortcut) on my desktop, and then the program will start with the click of the mouse.
Hpmsgsrv is NOT a regular Windows service, which means you cannot kill it off with the Administrative Tools Service manager. I killed it with Task Manager. The old three finger salute (control-alt-delete) still works to bring up task manager. Hpmsgsrv in in the process list only it tries to hide itself under the name hpservices. No matter. STOP shuts down the copy in RAM. Select the "Startup" tab in task manager and set hpservice to Disabled. Underneath hpservices is a second bit of crapware calling itself "Hp Smart Adapter". He is now gone too. Web searching tells me that HP Smart Adaptor was nagware that specialized in selling you genuine HP accessories. I don't need that either.
I will have to check tomorrow that the "disable" in task manager really works. If it fails and lets hpmsgsvc come back to life, I plan to go after it with regedit. According to web sources, a Run key in the registry starts hpmsgsrv. If necessary I will use the search function in regedit to locate and then zap a registry key that contains "run" and the program name (hpservices.com). This probably won't be necessary, task manager is supposed to have done all this, but just in case a new Micro$oft feature doesn't work, I have a backup plan.
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