Phantom Typist??

[Guest Sarah_SPV]

So I was sitting here minding my own business this evening posting on the forum and listening to some mp3s when all of a sudden my cursor started flashing and then started typing on it's own! It didn't make any sense. See what I managed to copy below:

If Fife this land and sandman......a a a a man in a van an old a file not found in a severe survey a man abandoned by Mather zero.

So I saw the 'file not found' and panicked thinking someone (called Mather Zero - sounds a bit hax00rish) was hacked in or it was a virus and disconnected immediately. The words kept coming up! Now, bearing in mind I was on my own in the house I was starting to get worried. Worried, but intrigued so I kept watching. This went on for about half an hour! I couldn't work it out.

So I checked all the processes I had running and I noticed one that I hadn't seen before (SAPISVR.EXE) and it was taking up about 80% of the CPU so I stopped it. As soon as I did the words stopped....

Do you want to know what it was??? This is the weirdest thing I have ever seen.

OK, a while ago I switched on Microsoft Speech Recognition (one of the main reasons being to type in loads of rude words when I was drunk - you know how it is) and part of that app is sapisvr.exe. That was running in the background and was picking up words from the songs I was playing (I think, or just noise in the background...). Whenever I went into a data-entry field in IE the words appeared! Has anyone ever seen this before??

Oh there's hours of fun there to be had winding colleagues up at work with. :)

[Guest casper508]

Now that u've mentioned that you had a voice recognition software running reduces the chances of SPYWARE. I've read people complaining the same thing while running SAPISVR.EXE.

[Guest ClintEastman]

I had the same thing!!

Thought i was triping for about a week....

Then i realised i had been playing with the speech in Office XP, switch it off, problem solved! :wink: