Dolphin.exe triggering a rundll32 on boot doing massive disc I/O

[DaRkL3AD3R]

This just happened to me. From a cold boot, I log in and just chill browsing Steam not doing anything in particular. I hear my hard disk churning away like crazy, to the same extent as when it does a defrag. I pull up task manager and see 100% disc activity on my D: drive, the one where my emulation folder is located. Open resource manager and sort by highest disc read, and there's a rundll32 reading Dolphin.exe, flooding my drive's activity.

What the hell is this? I have dev build 6080 installed. Never once seen this before. It's not consistent, since I terminated the rundll32 it hasn't returned, even after a cold boot. Any ideas why this is happening?

[tueidj]

That's not caused by Dolphin. Sounds like a virus scanner, malware or some other sort of snake-oil "system optimizer".

[Xtreme2damax]

On boot? You mean booting Windows and not launching a game?

Definitely not Dolphin. Dolphin doesn't run on boot.

Check for some service or third party software causing this. Could be what tueidj said, some driver or third other party software. I noticed my system sometimes does that but I write it off to background defragmentation and caching.

[mimimi]

Maybe it's checking the games folder? But it should usually say so and fill the list in the backgroud.

Get Process Monitor from Microsoft and then take a look at what exactly is causing this.

[NKF98]

Sounds like a sneaky-sneaky malware. Not Dolphin related.

[DaRkL3AD3R]

That's not caused by Dolphin. Sounds like a virus scanner, malware or some other sort of snake-oil "system optimizer".

That was my initial thoughts too, but I only have Windows Defender installed, no other scanning type programs, and when Defender is scanning it uses MsMpEng.exe to do all it's activities. This was just some random rundll32.exe process scanning only Dolphin.exe on my D: drive. I can't emphasize that enough, the significance of it only dealing with Dolphin.exe.

[shuffle2]

It may also be something nvidia related, they have special rules for dolphin.exe (afaik they think it is the KDE file manager...).

[tueidj]

You'd have to inspect the process to see what DLL rundll was running.

[Aleron Ives]

You may also want to check msconfig's list of startup items to see if one of them invokes rundll32.exe. If you suddenly have a new entry that's unrelated to the software you run intentionally, then it's malware. It's definitely not related to Dolphin, though. Dolphin doesn't create any startup entries either in your Start Menu startup folder or in the registry.