Hey all you PC savvy wascals.

In my Start Tray I'm getting an icon with the letters "FFA" in it that whimsically disappears whenever I go down to investigate with my cursor.

Is this some nifty program of sorts tied to nVidia drivers or one of the games I've purchased recently or is someone having funnies and reminding me that no matter what kind of an asshole I am, my shit still smells better than most others?

This is the first thing that I saw.

Judging from all the hits I'm getting with the appropriate keywords in Google, I'm going to go out on a limb and say you use a program called ffdshow?

I found that too and nope, I don't.

Not unless it came as necessary third party software for one of my recent games or was included in an older driver set for nVidia (recent drivers have obosleted my card).

Also, in safe mode, I used to get 800 x 600 now I can't go past 640 x 480....which also might be attributed to the old nVidia drivers that I recently installed.

That's cool man.

It's actually been on my PC for awhile, just remembered it when I saw it again coming out of Warrior Kings.

In fact, I'm think that it's common ad ware that I usually sweep away anyway when I do my daily PC cleans. Probably picking it up from one of the sites that I frequent.

That "FFA" is coming from an audio codec, it launches when you start a program that uses it. It can anything, from a game to an editing program or a media player.
The fact that it acts weirdly like it does shouldn't constitute any danger, even though it's not normal. There must have been a problem when it closed at some point, I don't know. Nothing to be worried about, really.

Ah, I think with your help I've sluethed it.

I don't see it often because not many of my games use that codec
But when closing out of games that do It takes a second for it to leave the tray
and is just coincidental that it finally removes itself right as I approach it with my cursor.

While I don't see the FFA icon, I have the same experience with several other programs not being removed from the tray immediately on shut down. It's pretty much nothing to worry about.

You are being taken over by the blue corduroy. The blue corduroy will judge your dirt and tell you that it takes 500 years to grow an inch. I don't see what the problem is. Mind erasers are awesome.

I think this is right. Is the icon blue, with ffa written in it? That should be ffdshow. You can find an example of the icon here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow-tryout/ - click the screenshots.

It comes up on my tray when / after playing Independence War 2, so that game must be using the codec somehow. So far as I know, that's the only game I play that uses it so you might not be seeing it unless you launch whatever game / app that also uses that codec.

What codecs have you installed recently?

There must be an option during installation and/or some tool to disable icons.

Tbh, dunno why would one install codecs these days. Open everything that WMP can open with it, and open anything it doesn't support with VLC.

You get to keep your system free of any modifications. ;)

Yeah, I get the same thing. It can result in a stack of the same icon if you don't mouse over them.

I used to get an icon like that when I had the Combined Community Codec Pack installed.

http://cccp-project.net/

Nothing to worry about.

Actually, none of your games use that codec.
They just make a call to the system for a decoder and the system returns FFDShow since you' ve marked it as your default codec for that particular type of video (when you installed it).
There are even rare occasions where games crash during the playback of videos because of FFDShow, which is why it's possible in the configuration of FFDShow to 'blacklist' applications.
Not really applicable to this discussion, but it might be interesting information for some.

Is there some place in Win XP that I can select default codecs? I'm getting looping in some some video playbacks.
I didn't install this intentionally, it must've come packaged with something else. I did install Rad Tools awhile back because I was trying investigate why my bik videos were looping.