Possible malware appears after playing video or music on Chrome, WMP, Edge, etc
I posted this question on the Microsoft forum but over there nobody had any clue on what might be causing this my issue and I am not sure that the answers I got there were accurate. One user pointed to a possible hardware malfunction, but I doubt that is the issue. Reason is cause the onset of the issue coincided with the installation of a new battery that I bought on Amazon (when I tried to calibrate it, lots of crashes and errors happened, so I aborted the calibration and gave up on it altogether).
The issue is that I've been seeing very strange mini-player pop-ups that look like a virus after I watch a video on Youtube (or any other media player actually, such as WMP, VLC, the windows 10 music app, Chrome, Edge, etc. It only doesn't seem to affect i-Tunes).
In addition to the very shady and extremely invasive mini-player pop-ups, which appear at the same time that the video player in question starts to act up (image flickers and the sound starts to break up), there were all sorts of other issues afflicting the computer (windows defender would not finish a whole scan of the C:\ drive, keyboard would stop responding, computer restart would enter an endless loop where the option to continue to the Windows OS would be missing, etc. etc.) Btw, in the case of WMP, the music breaks up, but the mini-player doesn't seem to appear out of nowhere.
In brief, I had to do a few system resets, and the problem came back when I chose to keep my personal files, and even when I simply restored an image taken back in Jan-24 on top of an entirely new SSD drive that I installed after the recovery environment deleted all the partitions of my disk, except for C:\ (it gave me warnings, but I didn't fully understand what it meant, since last time I did a computer restore from a system image was nearly 8 years ago, and back then as far as I remember the recovery tool wouldn't delete any partitions except for the C:).
Since this possible malware came back even after I restored a system image from back when this problem didn't exist (Jan-24), on top of an entirely new disk, I think it may be coming back thru the installation of software such as Chrome or Adobe. Another possibility is that some of my external disks got infected, and when I attach them, the virus somehow makes a return. These are all speculations, of course, there's also the possibility that my HP laptop has a hardware issue, as one user pointed out, though it passes all the tests on the HP hardware self-test program. It's almost 8 years old.
For those interested in knowing more, here are links to two posts on the MS forums (assuming this is allowed here):
Computer got a virus and winre.wim is missing: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/my-computer-got-a-virus-and-winrewim-is-missing-re/d61426af-af2c-4693-a5df-1b09b44603da
Could this be a virus? https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/could-this-be-a-virus/d2a3ac16-1bd0-463e-88a2-558326daa183?page=1
Edit: It seems to be a so-called OSD. But how would you explain its being followed by the original video flickering, erroring out and the sound breaking up? Is it normal for it to do that every time? Besides, it's not just the controls, there's also the mini-player with a clone of the original video, and everything flickers and the sound breaks up. It's extremely invasive and it's a mess.
