Take a low-level look at your PC desktop with Window Inspector

Binary Fortress Software has released Window Inspector, a free tool for examining the low-level details of any application window.

Move your mouse cursor over any window and a detailed display lists its class, text, icons, owning process, command line, Style and StyleEX flags, and more.

A separate tree lists the hierarchy of all desktop windows, and allows them to be closed individually.

If you’ve not guessed already, Window Inspector is mostly for developers, but it can also be occasionally handy for everyone else.

Suppose a desktop alert appears with a strange error message, for instance, or that you just don’t recognize. Is it malware-related? You’ll want to find the owning process, and Task Manager won’t always tell you.

With Window Inspector, all you have to do is move the mouse cursor over the alert, and you’ll see the process which launched it, along with its path, file name and command line arguments.

The program’s list of open windows can also be a helpful way to find out more about the processes running on your PC.

Expanding a cryptic process name like "avgnt.exe", for example, showed us the text "Avira Free Antivirus -- SysTray": the Avira system tray icon.

You could find similar information in Task Manager, but there’s more. The process also has a window called "Protection Cloud", with prompts like "uploading", "filename" and "please wait while the program started is being analyzed".

Even if you’ve never heard of Avira or Protection Cloud, you can see from this that the process is probably going to look for programs being launched, upload and analyze them somewhere.

This kind of information is only available because the process is going to display it to you anyway, so it won’t help you understand malware, or anything else which is trying to hide a function. But it may still be useful information, and Window Inspector makes it easy to find and explore.

Window Inspector is a freeware tool for Windows XP and later.