Information about ctfmon.exe file

When you run a Microsoft Office XP program, the file Ctfmon.exe (Ctfmon) runs in the background, even after you quit all Office programs.
Ctfmon.exe monitors the active windows and provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies.
See How to uninstall CTFMON.EXE

Note: The ctfmon.exe file is located in the c:\windows\System32 folder. In other cases, ctfmon.exe is a virus, spyware, trojan or worm! Check this with Anti-Spy.Info.

User feedback

Rating Opinion From Ctfmon.exe activates the Microsoft Office Language Bar and the Alternative User Input Text Input Processor. Alex it was a virus on my machine. I found it outside the windows/system32 folder Dan A Can either be part of the language bar, or part of spyware. Alcy If you are using any of the IME language pack additions to the NT or XP operating systems this will be on your system. If you are unsure whether it is malware or not you can use Spybot S&D to toggle it off to see whether you notice any performance change (ie malfunctioning foreign language input), before deciding whether to remove it completely. NormalScience; Webmaster It's a pain to remove the legit one - you have to read the MS knowledge base, just stopping in MSconfig often doesn't work.  link for more info Emma Part of MS Office. Difficult to get rid of, but if not a resource hog, not bothersome  link for more info Paul M it could be spyware. also if delated from the xp service pack one files, you are warned that windows could become unsable. Scott I know that it interferes with playing encrypted DVDs using RealMAGIC Holywood Plus card ... why is this so? lala It causes my pcs to intermittently freeze up "Ctfmon.exe" aktiviert den Texteingabeprozessor (Text Input Processor = TIP) "Alternative Benutzereingabe" und die Microsoft Office-Sprachleiste.  link for more info Vampire I know that Ad-Aware doesn't like it Kris this file runs in the background even when I uninstalled microsoft office i found this file to be the cause of my computer lag problems. Andrius yes its activate in my computer first time using ie it cause my ie error . BiJiQ when it runs at start-up I cant connect internet via ADSL. I clean it from start-up section and I can connect easily a a erim this file keeps XP from loading completely, I have to stop its process to allow icons to continue to load Jason Windows system-file.. pls. read added link!  link for more info administrator File can be a necessary file for some Microsoft Office programs, or it can be viral. If you're unsure you can delete the file, and you will be prompted to reinstall it next time you run a Microsoft Office program - you then know you have the non-viral file installed. GSC Some times my Windows XP is very slow and this file is the responsable Nelson I do not have installed Office XP and ctfmon.exe is running in my windows XP Nelson It cause my pcs always access HD, at win98 go to sys information ,disable ctfmon.exe at startup, then rename ctfmon.exe to another name. Its work at my pcs. Andre Ctfmon.exe activates the Alternative User Input Text Input Processor (TIP) and the Microsoft Office Language Bar. Ctfmon.exe monitors the active windows and provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies. Removing the Ctfmon.exe might cause problematic behavior in your Office XP programs, so removing it is not recommended. To prevent Ctfmon.exe from running, follow the steps on the attached link to MSKB.  link for more info CraigC This file like many annoying Microsoft files can be easily removed by deleting it from its folder and within a few seconds creating another file or folder named the same in the same place. If this causes a worry at all just delete the file or folder that you created to block it out. I found this works for this file Blownaparte Ctfmon.exe activates the Microsoft Office Language Bar and the Alternative User Input Text Input Processor. -- that's no right, I not use office and I haven't installed it recelently (I use StarOffice) so I don't think that is a Microsoft Office component SeTZeR it just activates the language bar... not soooo dangerous Mau-BR Office xp file, can unistall, read link:  link for more info Tiagorl I've had multiple PC complain about CTFMON.EXE on shutdown, failing to shut down properly and hanging the box. I will be removing it from this point on!  link for more info Jeff Ellman - Integration Technologies, Inc Überwacht jeden Tastendruck auf dem Rechner...gut oder schlecht entscheidet der, der es installiert hat oder auch nicht ! Mick Many people confuse the legitimate CTFMON with the trojan CFTMON - make sure you read carefully. It's part of Office XP and not at all dangerous. It doesn't have any effect on performance either. Trying to remove it will only screw things up, so live with it. Dave C There is another file with the same name. Its a keylogger program call Family keylogger. Could be dangerous if you did not install it. Defult key to unhide it is Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F. Nemesis I have office xp running on w2k advanced server. I frequently got blue screened when using Word,Terminal Services, MS Outlook, and IExplorer. (problem with the ntkernal the blue screen said.) I also notice bad lag in word just before the crash when i ctrl and drag something. I have since removed ctfmon.exe from the run section in the registry (backed it up first :P just incase) and no more word lag or blue screens. And i havent come across anything I want to do that removing this file seems to have messed up. Dude when trouble with internet or any other process not running at normal speed I delete it from memory and then the slow operation works fine. I believe in my ase it is used to interfere with my work or backup operations. Hard to shut off. Usually loads when an office or IE window opens but pops up on its own when I am having difficulties. I believe it is hacker related. Larry eaiest way to disable in WinXP...click start-run...type gpedit.msc and click ok...in the window that comes up, navigate to Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Software Restriction Policies\Additional Rules...Click Action\New Hash Rule...click browse and select the ctfmon.exe file...click ok...log out and in again and it will never run again me I've stopped it from running using the task manager over and over again, but it just keeps coming back up. My PC has seriously slowed down, but that's about all it's done. Norton doesn't see anything wrong with it and none of my spyware/adware stuff does either. I've actually deleted this file and everything and it just won't go away! Emily most of this type of .exe files are harmless if in doubt, do not delete them, quarantine it paul This is a part of Office XP and Windows XP. It's not dangerous, as you've no doubt read already. Additionally, it's not entirely necessary unless you're using speech or handwriting recognition. I have removed the file from starting on my system and suffered no ill effects. Justin Ellis, Trainer, The Computer Workshop, Inc. To find out , doubleclick it in Anti-Spy.Info. All the information pertaining to the originator of the file is there including what it's for. Dustproof2 I had the viral one. It caused major la isues and I disable it from the startup Rodger Annoying. Uninstall vie MS instructions, links are given at several places above! Mike it's always in the background, safe system file usually mike z it is an office file, running backword family keyloger :D probabily Cupydon Not a virus but USELESS process Yarik Microsoft, but not needed.  link for more info John  link for more info Mattin See the link from Microsoft Knowledge Base. However, what Microsoft says here is not true!!! MS Office has never touched my WinXP Pro computer and I still have CTFMON.EXE and it runs automatically.  link for more info Peter Microsoft office File if in system 32 otherwise do not know, in my case it was in system 32 folder but i deactivated it just in case  link for more info Mr.Dude this file is a pain for gamers, or anyone who always requires 100% of their cpu performance, it caused my comp to lockup and chugout every so often Mike I have SpyBot S&D and there is a warning message that informs WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CTFMON.EXE as a parasite related Guillermo Can be either MS Office XP Startup Process or a spyware/adware/malware CoolWebSearch process DJ The average person does not need this at all and is annoying and may cause problems with other programs to dissable it Control Panel - Regional and Language Options - Languages TAB - Details BUTTON - Language Bar BUTTON (under "Preferences") Select the "Turn off advanced text services" check box. Gary I found a keylogger named ctfmon.exe It records all key pressed in a file ctfmon.log Ovidiu I have never installed Office XP, nobody else uses my computer. And I have that file, too. nofear2k This file is the most UNDANGEROUS file in the whole wide world... ctfmon aint hard to shutdown. It's simple. Start windows in safe mode go to system32 folder and remove ctfmon.exe. Then go regedit and remove all keys belonging to ir (HKEY users and local Run keys)  link for more info Sn0WDr4gon Part of Microsoft Office Language Bar and the Alternative User Input Text Input Processor.. uses such a nominal amount of resources it's not worth your time trying to get rid of it. Dan Booth I had installed the Spanish language keyboard as an option, but CTFMON was interfering with a web-cam driver (huh?). Not dangerous, but annoying. SeamanTom Seems it stopped my ADSL connection to work ok. I desintalled the file (as per instruction given in other comments), and now it is working ok. I hope I will not experience any instability as described by Microsoft. Galaf59 I do not have office installed, but this service exists!!! aly some times it slows my pc and IE SDK é um vírus, que as vezes pode nao deixar seu computador inicializar corretamente Mico ItŽs a virus. My computer had pop-up, slower run, and freeze or tilt every moment. I kill him and the problems disappear. Medico_dc as far as i kno there is a file ctfmon.exe that has to do with microsoft office programs such as microsoft word,microsoft powerpoint,etc. if u right click it then hit properties then the information on it pops up. on the tabs there should be one called version.click it and read the info on it. it should say sumthing like copyright microsoft corp. and stuff. so this is cleary not the one. maybe its cftmon.exe not ctfmon.exe. yet ive never heard of the trojan cftmon.exe dave has so however we may have gotten sumwhere today.....wat did we learn. CTFMON.EXE is with microsoft word,etc and CFT.EXE terrell i try to close the language bar and it goes away then returns a couple of minutes later. Even when I delete the process it still returns. So I don't like it and it's made by Microsoft whom I totally do not trust!! anais When spooling a DOC file to print, it went to 99% of the CPU usage and after printing the document it remained at 99% until I rebooted. CKS Office file: not a resource hog, but a process hog. Easily turned off: go to control panel Regional and Language Options Languages Details Advanced check box "turn off advanced... voodoodoctor This file is needed for Voice Recognition. If you have the microphone taskbar loaded then this will be active. Gravity My startup has been running very slow lately. When it gets to the welcome screen it freezes at that point and will not move any farther. So everytime I press crtl+alt+delete and what do you know ctfmon.exe is running. So finally I tried ending it and my desktop loaded up instantly. Now I have to use ctrl+alt+delete to end it every time I boot up my computer. Can someone help? Neil This file appears after installing the Microsoft SpeechSDK. Unless you are using speech recognition software it isn't neccessary to run it. jon END it. everything else will be fine. MK it runs in background, starts on startup and it's impossible to disable it from starting normally. Spybot S&D identifies it as malicious software/spyware; it doesn't do anything useful, no program specifically requires it, so i blocked it and never had any error requesting it to run or anything of that kind, but instead less processes in task manager (: Serge If it is in the system32 folder nothing is wrong but if its outside that folder it is probably a keylogger as Cupydon said can be removed by tweak-xp tools, remove it from the autostart menu, waste of memory and resources, nobody needs it. anonymous This is used by Office Xp por Input reasons.. u can just search this file inside microsoft knowledge DB. But there is a new virus called Win32.GMSteal. A that infect this file... and hijack your web browsing with myie2 avant browser and maybe others.. EZ trust antivirus clean this file but u cand manually delete it..  link for more info Turko If this runs at system startup or login, it could be this worm.  link for more info Chuck Yes¡¡ is an office file ; and to get rid off it just remove the item from the system configuration utility  link for more info oZ!! (HP tech support) Ctfmon.exe monitors the active windows and provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies. It's an ever annoying helper tool that comes rather unexpectedly at times and liked by nearly nobody. Javed Iqbal Lodhi And if you find this service running or located outside \windows\system32 folder, then it is not the normal system file, you might want to scan your computer and get rid of it. Just in case you want to stop the service, if that is the normal service, control panel -- regional and language options -- languages tab -- details button -- language bar button and from there, disable it Javed Iqbal Lodhi I am not sure but diabling this file speed up my Internet access (dial up using GPRS), I am not sure why? Narinder Sahota Its a geniuine window process although there may be some trojan/viral variant of it if you have ability to set process prority set to low if high and if it returns to its original priority then its malicious Tony Stark Win32 system file. Its a geniuine window process it occours when you want to direct text from a web page directly to HD on a text document. There may be some trojan/viral variant of it if you have ability to set process prority set to low if high and if it returns to its original priority very quickly then i would say its malicious Tony Stark may have been replaced by one from a scumware program to use to host it speedball It is a windows file. Uninstall office if it's a problem. Ach y fi Not dangerous but annoying. difficult to remove in my system... Daniel If I understand MS correctly, you need this if you use the language bar to switch between keyboard layouts (as I do), or use other special input methods (speech recognition, etc) TGN Seems to be office releated, disbled it in msconfig and everything works still well. Ron This causes a conflict with the latest version (8.0) of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Scansoft recommends disabling the process - follow the directions posted earlier. Jon Virus ALERT ! My symantec say it to my it seems not be spyware... hans This file was in my windows\system32 directory, on a machine without Office installed. Ferry Heemsbergen It is some program installed with microsoft office and monitors the files associated with MSoffice for indexing etc. MrIndia It sometimes (not on all computers) causes failure of MIDI devices - this is important to musicians - I just disable it in the startup using msconfig Len Henderson csrssu.exe and ctfmon.exe files are copied to c:\windows\system32 with CAPITAL letter file. These files are trojan to open backdoors of PC. Somebody pls tell me how to remove them. SY Ctfmon.exe monitors the active windows and provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies.  link for more info John I had a nasty trojan which installed ctfmon32.exe - a big problem which self-replicated when I deleted it. But I also had the genuine ctfmon.exe in the same folder (no '32' in the name) which was fine. Don't confuse the two names. Tim ctfmon.exe is used to Inject a DLL named msctf.dll into all running processes. The msctf.dll resides within the System32 folder and is used to hook all WH_??? messages generated. I have hooked the API calls from msctf.dll and found that It hooks the keyboard, mouse and windows shell. Why, I don't know. As this is a trusted module installed by MS, I assume it is safe. But I also consider anything that hooks the keyboard to be a potential risk.  link for more info Anon Developer I found while surfing the web, a popup that asked if I would install this y/n. after accidently accepting by mistake. It changed my Active desktop, to some kind of spyware warning notice, put pornography links on my desktop and hijacked my browser start page. I found the infected file to be in memory, though, it was previously /system32/ctfmon.exe, now infected. So I attempted to delete only to find it recreated itself again! Then after afew reboots and removal attempts, at shutdown I see a window popup titled "Microsoft.corp.#" freezing up. (an trojan access attempt running hiddenly?)  link for more info Beware simply use winpatrol 9.0 to disable it. u can always enable it back if u encounter any trouble. Ralf System file :P Diego I know that everytime it came on it fragged my Internet connection... I slapped that bitch with a delete and haven't had a lick of trouble since. Scirocco GTX I have Microsoft Works and not Office installed on here. Might be part of Windows Update. It is in windows/system32. Causes a moment of lag during startup but does nothing else. Does not appear to be Spyware, Adware or virus/trojan/worm. Im staying Neutral due to the amount of lag it causes on my Laptop which does have Office. Systems with 256MB RAM will suffer more that systems of 1024MB (mine) Rahkin Slows my entire system and dsl connection, as soon as i end process with task manager everything is ok again! definately move where viable. Roy WinPatrol noticed it being added to Startup after I added speech recognition via Add/Remove Programs -Update Office XP Dennis Every time I delete it from the "Run" area of the registry, it re-appears. I installed Ad-Watch, which reports ctfmon.exe trying to be put back into the registry whenever I reboot my PC and run an office application. Joe I run both Office 2003 and Windows XP SP 1 and ctfmon.exe is automatically loaded. If the file is stopped or uninstalled, speech recognition stops working although you can still train the system. The file on my system is only 13k bytes in size but uses 444 kbytes when running. Bill if you go to search and search for msconfig.exe once you find it open it, look trough the different tabs until you find one with a lot of processes on it that u would usually find in your task manager (alt+ctrl+del) go down until you find ctfmon.exe disable it, when requested, (after closing the program) restart, should never bother you again. mick from australia my ctfmon.exe is for my japanese language pack that was installed on a fresh windowsXPpro it's been there ever since.. Never run Office before and never will. Open office is much better anyway. ctfmon in some cases is just language pack. Frank_Castle I don't have microsoft office xp and it is runig on my other users proccess. hi If you installed Unreal Tournament 2004. You may have also installed the Speed Redist. as well. Check Add/Remove programs for speech enabled programs. midfingr This file is both harmless and dangerous. A variant of coolwebsearch (one of the worst spyware out there) now uses the legit ctfmon to fiddle with IE explorer (not sure exactly how). Also other forms of spyware and malware are begining to use ctfmon.exe so if you don't use the legit applications of ctfmon then disable and or delete it. crazyed it is incorporated with the "my doom" virus going to check it out this arvo, be back with info soon mate. Micky d! Hier ist mehr im Spiel als ihr denkt.Ctfmon.exe ist ein Ueberwachungssystem, nur getarnt als Microsoft Office Bestandteil. Mit dem Taskmanager in die Quarataene damit ! Frank the Cracker Die ctfmon.exe ist ein Programm das zu Office gehört. Sie überwacht offene Fenster und dient der Spracherkennung, sowie der Zurverfügungstellung alternativer Texteingabegeräte und der Spracherkennung. Im übrigen kann das Programm auf dem PC sein, obwohl man gar kein OFFICE XP hat. DataFighter its part of the office suite and cant be disabled through msconfig as it writes itself back again. follow this doc..its easy to get rid of,  link for more info nanoman x Installed as part of sp2 CTF Loader Company Microsoft Corporation File version 5.1.2600.2180 (xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158). This is inside the C:\Windows\system32 file Christ67 on my computer this is a virus, too, you must use win tasks adamoles Dieser Prozess ist zu 70% immer der grund warum mein system hängt mach ich ihn weg, läuft alles super. Weg damit ! Slacer Had Spybot resident running while not connected to the net. It wanted to install once installation of OFFICE 2003 finished. It may log your input, but its not spyware. Eddie Gets installed by other programs besides office. My XP laptop had it installed when I put on the new Delorme Street Atlas USA 2005. The "alternate input" in this case is the voice command to the mapping program. Anyway, be aware that other programs besides Office install this file. Phil This file also takes control of com1 serial port cavu when i deleted it, it came straight back... files dont usually do that bleh It is an Office Program that isn't harmful. But it can't be easily removed and it takes up lots of memory. If you know more about ctfmon.exe, share your knowledge and help other users. Your opinion:  --- don't know ---  1 (not dangerous)  2  3 (neutral)  4  5 (dangerous) What do you know about this file: Link for more details: Your Name:

Search Results for ctfmon.exe in

• Google
• Discussion boards

Other files