As far as I understand it, TRACERT.EXE is a diagnostic tool I’d initiate, not one that would start of its own accord every time I start my computer and produce a firewall alert.
• Could anyone tell me why it would do that? It is something that cropped up recently. Running a virus scan on it comes up clear.
• Could some other app be waking it up?
• Could I safely instruct it not to start at startup?
I’m on/in/with Win7 and yes, TRACERT.EXE is in the Windows/System32 folder.
Unless you are using custom ruleset mode, you shouldn’t get a firewall alert if the firewall is set to safe mode and tracert is rated as trusted. Confirm in the file list and in the firewall alert that tracert is safe/trusted. You can run autoruns to see if it is set to auto start or you can use sysmon and view the logs to see which process is launching it. Also check the autorun event logs to see if anything was detected to auto start. You might need to change the filter date & time to no filtering or entire period.
Thanks for that reply [at]futuretech. Sorry to only reply now. It’s that time of year.
I have to confess that your advice went over my head. I had a go at it but in the end I found myself out of my depth and none the wiser. Autoruns was at least something I understood but it gave me no clue. A tracert filter on the Everything tab produces a blank. I scoured Process Explorer in vain too. Obviously something else is firing TRACERT.EXE up. It doesn’t help that it only happens at startup.
I finally found out what was was starting tracert.exe. It’s AvastSvc.exe.
It would come and go during start up so I started up Process explorer as soon as I could and watched and took a screenshot.
So it seems harmless but I’d still like to know what’s up. Asking Avast …