Duplicati will on occasion, at computer startup, open as what appears to be a stand-alone window/program. It has an icon on the task bar,
and when focusing on it, the window is just a little white rectangle floating on my screen. No window menus or options to close:
Duplicati also appears as an icon in the system tray:
I am able to close the rectangle window by right-clicking on the task bar icon, which gives option to close. When I do that, the little white rectangle window will close, and the tray icon stays.
What is this windows program that shows up sometimes? Is that supposed to happen? What does me closing it do - does it make it so that Duplicati doesn’t run as it should? I read that there is a Duplicati Windows Service, but I didn’t check to see if that was running before I closed the Duplicati rectangle thing.
Setup:
Windows 11 Pro v.23H2
Duplicati - 2.0.7.1_beta_2023-05-25
Is setup to run at computer startup and I have a daily backup scheduled
it reminds me of this
To confirm that it is really Duplicati that is displaying this window, you can use Process Explorer from SysInternals, with the Find Process tool beside the find handle tool (free Ms utility).
I think this is related to the way the updater is running. If you installed an update, you will essentially run that version instead of the installed version.
Can you check if the installed version (from Windows “Add/Remove programs”) is different from the version shown in Duplicati?
It is not even installed unless you ran Duplicati.WindowsService.exe manually.
If you’re not sure, Task Manager has a Services tab where it shows, if present.
Technically there is computer startup, and there is login startup sometime later.
The visible tray icon is at login and is all that the GUI installer allows as choice.
Another way to check your updater situation is to use About → System info for BaseVersionName and ServerVersionName now, but again if the issue occurs.
Sometimes my own Windows 10 does leave junk on the screen. Last time that
happened, I cleaned it up by killing dwm.exe (Desktop Window Manager) using
Task Manager (Run as administrator). Screen is briefly blank, then comes back.
Does it block the view of other things? That’s when I get annoyed at such issues.
@gpatel-fr , it sounds exactly like what that OP was reporting, except my task bar icon looks different, it’s the duplicati icon rather than a generic windows icon. And mine comes back every startup.
kenkendk & @ts678 , here are the versions of my installation from about > system info:
The little window has been returning after every computer startup. I did look at Task Manager this last time, and it is showing as an “App”. Here is screenshot of the little window next to task manager showing the windows process.
and here is screenshot again of the taskbar icon along with the tray icon. I’ve right-clicked on the taskbar icon:
After I close the taskbar process (by selecting close), the little window disappears, and in task manager only these two duplicati background processes remain. The duplicati app goes away.
The little window is not moveable, but it doesn’t obstruct anything. I guess I’m just trying to figure out with this duplicati windows process is and what it does. Because even when I close it, the backups seem to happen as scheduled.
The Service
Basically this is the same as the Duplicati Server component, but running as a Windows service. If Duplicati is registered as a Windows service, a small agent starts the server component and pings the server to verify it is running. If the server component is unreachable, the agent will restart it.
Could this “agent” be our little mystery app and window? But shouldn’t the agent be running as a process and not an app?
Maybe you were talking there about the Task Manager Apps view? Does anything change in Details?
Normally there are a pair of processes there, and I don’t know if anything else should be expected, if Duplicati Windows service is not running. Other questions are above, but some may no longer apply.
looks like it’s trying to show then hide a form, but for some reason perhaps your Windows isn’t hiding.
What might not quite fit there is I was expecting you’d get a square (10 x 10) window, but you didn’t…
If Tray Icon works normally, then maybe ignore the extra, or if you wish, test killing dwm.exe, as noted.
EDIT:
Another possible test is to right-click-Quit the tray icon, then try the desktop shortcut for Duplicati. This should be equivalent to the automatic start at login, except you can try it at a less busy time than login.
I think that is exactly what produces the rectangle. It is a problem with the way the tray icon is implemented in .Net. I think a quick-fix could be to close the form from code, which would be similar to manually closing the window (if the tray-icon still works after closing).
It is likely a race of sorts where the show() -> hide() is happening too fast, and in some cases the window is not hidden. If so, we can add a timer that invokes the hiding after a second or so.
But a real fix might be to rewrite the tray icon, using WPF or something more modern.
So while I had said it was coming back every reboot (it had for a while), now of course the window and app process hasn’t come back the past couple of boots, so I haven’t been able to see what processes or details are running under “details” when the window is present.
But the question was asked about the service portion running… and at least now (with the mystery window not running), there seems to be no service portion, just tray icon:
When in Task Manager > Processes, I see this (Trello shows up because I have reminder card about this issue on my Trello board):
And the tray icon does appear in the expanded tray. Right clicking reveals Open/Pause/Quit, with clicking Open resulting in launching the localhost in my browser.
Looking under details reveals just those two tray icon processes, no duplicate.server.exe or Duplicati.WIndowsService.exe:
But the scheduled backups appear to be running as they should.
As far as what I installed, I ran this, but I don’t recall what options I chose during installation: duplicati-2.0.7.1_beta_2023-05-25-x64.msi
Perhaps it is as @kenkendk suggested, that the show() → hide() code sometimes runs too fast, because indeed, when I manually closed the window, the trayicon processes remained and duplicati scheduled backups happened normally, so nothing seemed affected.
I’ll report here what I find under Task Manager > Details the next time the little window appears.
It is a workaround that the code needs a handle (it does not need the window), so you can just close it.
I have made a PR that has delay hiding, and I hope this fixes it.
Select which components you want to install. Pay special attention to Launch Duplicati at startup. If it is selected, the Duplicati Tray Icon Tool will be started automatically after logging on to Windows. The Duplicati Server component is included in the Tray Icon tool.
Note the ambiguity about “At startup”. It actually means “at login”. To get a Windows service at boot, Duplicati.WindowsService.exe has to be run manually. There is more discussion of the setup above.
Combining Windows service with a tray icon requires turning off the server that’s inside the tray icon:
--no-hosted-server
Set this option to not spawn a local service, use if the TrayIcon should connect to a running service.
(to nitpick, at least the first “service” should be “server”. Maybe second too, though “service” starts it)
With both tray process and little window showing, task manager shows only the two Duplicati.GUI.TrayIcon.exe processes running (I got the little rectangle window in the screenshot next to task manager):
After I right-click > Close Window on the little window’s taskbar icon, nothing at all changes with the processes in task manager. So it must be as kenkendk had theorized, that the window is just a residual artifact of the process startup. I’ll just manually close the window when it happens, and we can call this mystery solved and will await the PR to get addressed in a future update! Thank you both for your diligence in helping troubleshoot.
