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I have been using my Windows 10 system for about half a day now following the Creators Update install. I have been getting the following sound being played randomly:

Windows Critical Stop.wav

I don't know the source, as there is no associated messagebox or notice anywhere.

How can I go about tracing this annoying problem?

Sabuncu
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    When the sound appears the next time, press WINDOWS+R keys, enter eventvwr.exe, now click on "Windows Logs" in the left column, click on "System" and now look for errors (not warnings or information) that happened in the moment the sound appeared and add them to your question.Also make sure that no program which is minimized as a system tray makes that sound (you could stop such programs and see if the sound appears). – testeaxeax Sep 11 '17 at 16:47
  • @nullterminatedstring The sound just happened, and I launched the Windows event viewer. Unfortunately, there were no recent events posted, error or non-error. I will have to look into your second suggestion, to selectively enable/disable tray apps. – Sabuncu Sep 11 '17 at 18:47
  • Okay, where there any errors logged in the category "Application"? – testeaxeax Sep 12 '17 at 15:32
  • @nullterminatedstring There were errors, but with much earlier timestamps (from when the system was first booted up). I am thinking that I should leave procmon running, and when the sound happens, look at the logs. The only problem is, going through procmon logs is not pleasant. – Sabuncu Sep 12 '17 at 17:57
  • Actually going through procmon logs is not that bad, you need to set a filter to only include filesystem operations for the path "C:\Windows\Media\Windows Critical Stop.wav". – testeaxeax Sep 13 '17 at 14:57
  • @nullterminatedstring I hope the name of the wav file is included in the procmon logs. – Sabuncu Sep 13 '17 at 15:45
  • At least on my system the programs I tried accessed the wav file to play the sound and therefore got logged by procmon. – testeaxeax Sep 13 '17 at 17:09
  • @nullterminatedstring That's good news. Again, thanks so much for your support. – Sabuncu Sep 13 '17 at 19:10

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A thing to watch for is backspace; in some input fields and terminal prompts if you use backspace when the caret is at the start of the input field it makes the sound -- so make sure it is truly "random" and not just happening as you type.

The BEL (bell) character is an invisible control character which can also cause the sound -- type Ctrl + G (^G) in Command Prompt and hit enter for an example.

If are using a terminal application and you have programs that are writing to STDOUT you could capture their output and look in a hex editor to see if the value 0x07 (BEL) is present.

Pocketsand
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