I’m sure many of you are aware of the desktop goose prank program. It’s a program that spawns a little goose on your screen that generally is a nuisance but mostly harmless. Someone put this program on my Windows computer (desktop PC I built myself, running Windows 10) as a prank; it was pretty funny. I used task manager to end the program and thought that was that. But then the goose kept coming back. So I deleted the program from my file explorer and thought that would be the end of it. Until it came back yet again. So I checked the file explorer, and lo and behold, the program had somehow returned. I deleted it again, and again the goose came back somehow. This has continued to happen for months now.
At first, I thought someone was just continuously reinstalling it onto my PC, but it’s been going on for so long now, and I have taken such extensive precautions to prevent people from using my computer without my permission that I don’t think that is even possible. I even went into the safety mode thingy that Windows has and deleted the files from there, following a tutorial, and I made sure to delete everything that I could find relating to desktop goose. But it is still coming back. It’s not super frequent, but it consistently comes back about once a day, always appearing right when it’s been long enough that I forgot about it. I gave up trying to do anything about it since all I have to do when it shows up is quickly pop open task manager and end the program, but it’s starting to make me lose my mind, and I do not know what to do.
I have scoured the internet for anyone who knows what’s going on with this stupid goose, but everything I find just says to end the task or delete the program, both of which I’ve done multiple times. Please somebody help me, I need to end this torment before that goose starts appearing in my nightmares. I know the rules say no joke posts, and I understand this post may sound like it is a joke or a troll, but please believe me when I say I am not joking. The goose is not funny anymore, and I just want it gone permanently. Thanks
Have you checked your startup apps in Task Manager yet? That goose probably snuck itself in there. Also, run Malwarebytes; had similar stuff happen before, and it caught the stubborn ones.
I have checked startup; it’s not there, nor is it running in the background. Somehow it is running itself, I assume on some kind of timer, but I have no idea how or how to stop it since it doesn’t even show up in task manager unless the goose is actively running. I’m going to try Malwarebytes and see if that works. Thanks for the suggestion.
Oh my god, thank you! There was indeed a task in the Task Scheduler to run Desktop Goose on a timer while I’m logged in. Still no idea how it’s working after I deleted the program, but I assume there’s some part of it that’s hidden somewhere that allows it to come back. Anyways, I deleted the scheduled task, so hopefully, it will stop happening now, although honestly, I’m so paranoid about this stupid goose that I still feel like it’ll show up somehow. I’ll update the post and see if it ever comes back. Thank you so much!
I was going here: something like a batch script to run it from start-up, nice and quick to set up. Set the file to hidden and drop it in a random folder (like %appdata%)
UPDATE: As someone suggested in the comments, I checked the Task Scheduler (which I didn’t even know was a thing), and sure enough, there was a scheduled task every day to run the goose program. I deleted the task, and hopefully, that will prevent his return. Thank you all for your suggestions, and I will still be trying some of these just to ensure that I’ve deleted every ounce of that goose off of my PC.