dl.exe Virus?

Hi,

I cannot provide you with a version number because I have already uninstalled Weather Watcher.

I’ve been running weather watcher for a while and have recently noticed my machine slowing down. I’ve scanned for viruses and adware but found nothing. I looked at running processes in task manager to see if I could determaine what was taking so much processor time. When task manager came up I saw that a process named dl.exe was taking over 50% processing power. I resorted the list of running processes so I could click on it but it suddenly disappeared. I then Googled dl.exe and found that it came from Weather Watcher. When I did a search for dl.exe it was found in my C:\Program Files\WeatherWatcher folder. I deleted the file manually and then proceeded to uninstall Weather Watcher.

In the installed programs list I found 2 Weather Watcher; one was just “Weather Watcher” and the other was “Weather Watcher Live.” However when I clicked on the “support Info” link in Add Remove Programs both apps had Singer Creations as the author.

Can you tell me what’s going on?

DL.EXE is used by Weather Watcher Live to download data from the Internet. The weather data is fairly small, so your CPU shouldn’t spike too high while downloading that data. If you’re using the wallpaper feature and displaying a very large wallpaper on your desktop and/or have a very slow Internet connection, you might see a short CPU spike like that while the wallpaper is being downloaded. Other than that, you might want to verify that you’re not running any security-related software that is blocking DL.EXE from accessing the Internet.

DL.EXE automatically shuts down after it finishes downloading the requested data. If your machine is consistently slow, then I doubt DL.EXE is the cause. If it only slows down while DL.EXE is running, then it could be related.

Weather Watcher and Weather Watcher Live are different applications. It looks like you installed both.

Your reply explains everything I need to know except the fact that I find so many web pages that say dl.exe contains a virus or some kind of malware. Seeing that you have put this file into the Weather Watcher folder instead of System32 it is very possible there is another dl.exe that DOES contain a virus. Is this what you have found?

I use NIS 2010 and it has never picked up dl.exe as a virus or malware. The dl.exe file in the WWL folder is perfectly safe no matter what you read on those sites.

It’s possible to name a file anything, so it’s quite possible that there are other files on the Internet with the same name. The DL.EXE that is installed with Weather Watcher Live is definitely not a virus though. If you right-click the file and check out the properties, you will see it was created by me.