Random beep sounds?

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daisensou
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Joined: October 13th, 2011, 7:54 am

Random beep sounds?

Post by daisensou »

I'm using Win7 64bits here, the beep is from the default Asterisk sound, but why is it playing?

At first I thought it was to notify me of connection hiccups with either Hotmail or Gmail, but the thing is actually totally random, like:

- Clicking or hovering any of the menus (File, Edit, Tools, etc) makes the beep go off in random intervals.
- Right-clicking over any type of element and the beep goes off in random intervals.
- The beep will always happen when opening any type of window (options, account setup, etc)

Now, starting in safe mode seems to make it go away, but:

- My profile with everything disabled still has the beep problem (only the default theme is enabled, because I can't find a way to disable it like the safemode does)
- A clean profile with nothing (no addons, no enabled plugins and no accounts, only the default theme is enabled) will already have the beep problem

So, how can I identify the cause?
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smsmith
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Re: Random beep sounds?

Post by smsmith »

You didn't accidentally turn on any of the Ease of Access settings in the Windows Control Panel, did you?

Or, maybe you enabled the menu popup sound in your system sound theme? There's also a sound for Menu Command (when you pick something from a menu). Maybe that's what's going on.
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daisensou
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Joined: October 13th, 2011, 7:54 am

Re: Random beep sounds?

Post by daisensou »

Just checked, I have most things off in the Ease of Access settings, only thing enabled on most sections is the option to skip unneeded animations. My system sound scheme is the default one.

Using the DOM inspector, browsing the nodes related to the items described in the OP will trigger the beep too, but on a shorter interval, making a really, really annoying sound :D
daisensou
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Re: Random beep sounds?

Post by daisensou »

Clean install, clean profile. The beeping persists. Versions 8, 7, 6 and 5 (stand alone install and an updated copy from version 3 through 6 -> 7 -> 8) shows this behavior. Weird that I didn't notice this before because I thought it was "by design" under normal use (and I never really accessed the menu items after setting everything up in version 3, which was quite some time ago!).

Error Console shows nothing and now I just installed a clean v3.1.16 and it's dead silent (like it always was, I remember the first beeping sounds came along with whichever version introduced the new sleek icons).
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LoudNoise
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Re: Random beep sounds?

Post by LoudNoise »

Maybe something to do with AV or firewall?
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daisensou
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Joined: October 13th, 2011, 7:54 am

Re: Random beep sounds?

Post by daisensou »

Maybe something to do with AV or firewall?


Native firewall + Microsoft Security Essentials, disabling makes no difference.

So, even though I can't interpret the results, I launched SysInternals ProcMon to see what was going on and - all of the following mean nothing, as the behavior is the same in safemode :( :

- There's nothing there realated to WAV files or sound
- but the moment I trigger the beeping manually (by browsing the menus) TB starts looking for the MenuCommand.wav and MenuPopup.wav (their location in the registry or some odd places in case the keys don't exist, like: "C:\AppData\menucommand.wav")
- but no sign of the Asterisk or systemasterisk being called...

And now I'm out of ideas on how to troubleshoot this.
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tanstaafl
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Re: Random beep sounds?

Post by tanstaafl »

The only reference to a .wav file I can find using the config editor on my system is in the mail.biff.play_sound.url setting, which specifies a custom sound to be used for new mail notification

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/673856 talks about "there are two windows sounds for menus - they're called "Menu Popup" and "Menu Command" for when you open a menu (such as the start menu) and when you execute a command from that menu, respectively." Did you look in Windows 7's "System Sounds" or just the accessibility related settings?

viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1860875
daisensou
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Joined: October 13th, 2011, 7:54 am

Re: Random beep sounds?

Post by daisensou »

Ok, so I found the culprit just now after checking my brother's account and seeing it was problem free... Started disabling the only background applications I had running: AutoHotKey, DriveGleam, CrystalDiskInfo and the culprit D3DOverrider.

Firefox, Opera, IExplore and a bunch of random applications got added automatically to the exclude list (or maybe they were already there when I installed RivaTuner), but Thunderbird didn't... so D3DO Gobal settings was trying to apply TripleBuffering\Vsync on it and beeping at each successful\failed attempt :\

This was really random, sorry for bugging you guys with it!
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LoudNoise
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Re: Random beep sounds?

Post by LoudNoise »

No problem at all. Next time it someone has the problem we can quickly post "add Thunderbird to D3DOverrider" and look brilliant :).

Thanks for getting back to us.
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