It's been a couple of days since I've been seeing this weird behavior where some program flashes onto the screen, but before I can see what it is, it shuts down. This is very annoying as it also knocks me out of full screen mode, but I'm having a hard time figuring out what the root cause is.

I've tried scanning my system for viruses, but this turns up clean. My virus scanner (Avira) also doesn't show any events in the log right after the problem occurs. The only thing I've installed lately is a licensed Autodesk's 3DS Max 2018, it comes with Autodesk Desktop App, which I've exited and removed from startup. Not sure if the problem is related to that. I've also noticed there's a service running, I'll try shutting that down to see if that helps.

I'm on Windows 10 btw. Has anyone experienced something similar before? Does windows log what application have been launched and at what time? Or is there some other way to figure out what application is causing this?

I don't think there's a log of processes starting by default but you can use WMI to make one:

Run wbemtest as administrator (it's in system32\wbem but search will find it)

Click Connect, and Connect again in the new dialog

Change Method Invocation Options to Asynchronous

Click Notification Query

Put "Select * from Win32_ProcessStartTrace" without quotes in the box and click apply

Now go do what you're doing. The box will fill up with events for processes that are created, though it can take a few seconds after they're launched to be listed. Double click an event and scroll down the properties box, ProcessName is the process that was started and ParentProcessPid is who started it.

If the window is created by an already extant process, you might have to write some code for that. SetWinEventHook(EVENT_OBJECT_CREATE, ..). or RegisterShellHookWindow/SetWindowsHookEx(WH_SHELL, ...) will get you notifications of new windows.

Wow, thank you so much! I had no idea such a tool existed and shipped with Windows :-o.

It seems like the culprit is Microsoft Office <_<, officebackgroundtaskhandler.exe is apparently scheduled to run every hour (it runs much more frequently on my system, not sure why). Apparently there's a fix for it in build 16.0.8201.2025, which is available to those in the Office Insider program, more info here. I just disabled the scheduled task for the time being.

I had the same problem, thanks for the advice, now everything works fine