disgruntled sysadmin that’s recently left? Look for another VBS that runs itself, queries AD for comoputers, copies itself to any that are reachable and repeats.
Was it designed to stop other members of the family using the puter? the person who installed it knows to kill the task but to everyone else the machine is unusable. Pretty silly though
So they don’t have to remember (or know) to quote the path to avoid issues with spaces in the directory names? On a home edition of Windows you can pretty much do what you like in any part of the filesystem IIRC! Can’t imagine *NIX allowing any old user to drop a file in / 😉
If you open Task Scheduler as admin, what is in the Author column for this particular job? Is the author the same as the (main) user?
Who’s the Owner (security) of the .vbs file?
I didn’t think to check TBH. There’s only one user account on the laptop though (and it was something lame like “user,” presumably an OEM preconfiguration). EDIT – “Owner” I think it was.
Has Windows Explorer been set to launch each folder in a separate process, so basically “loads” of explorer.exe processes are created… and this task is to hoof them all in the slats?
There seem to be two steps configured (.vbs then .bat) – wouldn’t just the .bat have been sufficient?
Why might I want explorer to be terminated (and not restart)? An obscure way of stopping something else happening? Gaslighting someone else? Danger**** timer?
What’s the relationship between work colleague and laptop owner?
Your colleague is testing you and you’re about to be initiated into some secretive team / cult / mission and flown to a distant world to become a hero like in the Last Starfighter.
I don’t believe so. It’d be a nonsense to do that knowingly and then wonder why it was playing up?
There seem to be two steps configured (.vbs then .bat) – wouldn’t just the .bat have been sufficient?
IIRC it can be awkward to get the syntax just right when scheduling batch files, you need to invoke command.com /c to launch them. I’m assuming this was a workaround (though I’d have thought launching external scripts from VB required greater knowledge than scheduling a task).
Your colleague is testing you and you’re about to be initiated into some secretive team / cult / mission and flown to a distant world to become a hero like in the Last Starfighter.