Glancer.exe?

Was looking through the Windows reliability report today, and noticed
that a particular app has been failing a lot recently week after week.
The program is called Glancer.exe. It's located in the following path:

C:\Program
Files\WindowsApps\40622CannStudios.Glancer-YourPCVitalsataGlance_1.1.17.0_x64__81bpqsdd3gbhw\ VFS\Extracted\Glancer.exe

Everything under the WindowsApps folder is protected, even from
administrator access, so I can't get access to it. What could this be?
There are literally millions of files in a modern Windows installation,
and there's no way we can know everything that's been installed on your
machine.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:
Was looking through the Windows reliability report today, and noticed
that a particular app has been failing a lot recently week after week.
The program is called Glancer.exe. It's located in the following path:

C:\Program
Files\WindowsApps\40622CannStudios.Glancer-YourPCVitalsataGlance_1.1.17.0_x64__81bpqsdd3gbhw\ VFS\Extracted\Glancer.exe


Everything under the WindowsApps folder is protected, even from
administrator access, so I can't get access to it. What could this be?
There are literally millions of files in a modern Windows installation,
and there's no way we can know everything that's been installed on your
machine.

Yousuf Khan

It's semi-obvious from the naming convention that it's an App.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/p/gl...ot:overviewtab

And notice it's Free, and who knows whether Microsoft was stupid
enough to "promote" it by placing it on your computer without
your knowledge. I would have thought Free software would not
be deserving of automated promotion like that, and only Freemium
stuff with Pro features to purchase, would receive treatment
like that.

The Settings panel should have a section devoted to Apps. In
the example, you can see I'm about to remove some "Flappy Birds"
style of freebie. I also noticed in there, that the panel is
set so I can "get Apps from anywhere, including outside the Store".
No idea how that works.

https://i.postimg.cc/fR8MKHDW/Settings-Apps.gif

In the command line invocation here, there are two Powershell
programs used.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html

The first command, dumps a table of text.

Get-AppxPackage *Microsoft.3dbuilder*

In there, is a "full name" for a package.

That is piped to Remove-AppxPackage, and that program is
looking for a certain keyword, and then it knows the full name
is right next to that.

If you're not careful, you can remove everything which doesn't
have the "In-box" bit set. You cannot remove MSEdge, because
the In-box bit indicates it's a system program. There are
probably a few (spying) type things feeding Vortex, that
you should not (ordinarily) be able to remove. And the
In-box bit in the Apps database, is just a small part of the
barriers to removal.

And you're absolutely right - you can delete stuff. The
steps would be:

1) compact /compactOS:never

That decompresses at least some materials in the OS folders
for easier access from Linux.

2) Boot a Linux LiveCD and try deleting. If you see "I/O error",
that's not a bad sector. That's some metadata (Reparse Point)
applied to a file, seemingly to prevent a Linux user from
deleting stuff...

Your Glancer looks suspicious, as if I was crafting crud to
put in your OS, I'd certainly want to make crud that has
all sorts of permissions it wants. As then my little App
could have its way with your privacy.

Have fun,
Paul

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Was looking through the Windows reliability report today, and noticed
that a particular app has been failing a lot recently week after week.
The program is called Glancer.exe. It's located in the following path:

C:\Program
Files\WindowsApps\40622CannStudios.Glancer-YourPCVitalsataGlance_1.1.17.0_x64__81bpqsdd3gbhw\ VFS\Extracted\Glancer.exe

Everything under the WindowsApps folder is protected, even from
administrator access, so I can't get access to it. What could this be?
There are literally millions of files in a modern Windows installation,
and there's no way we can know everything that's been installed on your
machine.

https://cannstudios.com/

Click on the eyeball icon (left end of bottom row) for their projects to
see they produce the Glancer app. The description has a link to:

http://glancer.co/

The Help link provides almost nothing for help other than to state it is
a beta app which is free for now but may change to payware. Paul
already gave you the URL to the app page at Microsoft's Store site.

The author is CannStudios (named for its owner, Mike Cann) who also has
a Github profile at https://github.com/mikecann, a very small LinkedIn
profile at https://www.linkedin.com/company/cannstudios, a Twitter
profile at http://twitter.com/mikeysee, and a Facebook profile at
http://facebook.com/cannyshammy (which appears a broken or deleted
profile; however, I filter out any Facebook crap along with other
social-needy sites).

This app doesn't look to be anything from Microsoft. You sure you
didn't install it? It isn't listed as an app under Start - Settings -
System - Apps & Features under CannStudios or Glancer?

On 2/17/2019 2:02 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
This app doesn't look to be anything from Microsoft. You sure you
didn't install it? It isn't listed as an app under Start - Settings -
System - Apps & Features under CannStudios or Glancer?


No, the only thing I see under Apps & Features is Microsoft Edge.

On 2/18/2019 11:41 AM, wrote:
Check here

https://www.shouldiremoveit.com/Glan...3-program.aspx

No, that's "Glance" not "Glancer".

Yousuf Khan wrote:

On 2/17/2019 2:02 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
This app doesn't look to be anything from Microsoft. You sure you
didn't install it? It isn't listed as an app under Start - Settings -
System - Apps & Features under CannStudios or Glancer?


No, the only thing I see under Apps & Features is Microsoft Edge.

Did you also click on "Programs and Features" to see if it was a program
instead of an app?

https://www.tenforums.com/attachment... e697e3375dcd
(Apps shown on left, programs shown on right.)

In Windows/File Explorer's address bar, enter "shell:AppsFolder". The
app folder path you mentioned not there? If not there, that would
explain the error if, say, there was a scheduled event in Task Scheduler
or a startup entry to run the program that no longer exists. You could
use SysInternals' AutoRuns to search for glancer.exe to see how it might
be getting loaded by a scheduled event or startup entry.

You could clear the local cache of the Store apps by running
"wsreset.exe" and check the apps list again. See:

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/reset...ws-store-cache