Can't get rid of obs-studio-hook

[igor725]

I uninstalled OBS from my computer but the graphics-hook is still there. I tried to manually delete it (the whole obs-studio-hook directory) and fix my Vulkan layers configuration nad it looked like everything was normal... until I rebooted my PC. The hook installed itself back again. And this is not a virus or anything, these files actually signed. I also tried to install the latest OBS version and immediately uninstall it to see if issue is fixed... nope. This is annoying a little because my Vulkan apps sometimes hangs at boot and I can't even kill them, because of driver lock (the call stack leads from nvidia driver to OBS graphics hook). Doubt they hang because of it, it looks like transparent pass but I want to remove it anyways. The only solution in this case is to reboot windows entirely.
I'm actually out of ideas at this point how I should handle this :/

[RytoEX]

These files are copied here on OBS startup if they do not exist because they are required for Vulkan Capture to work correctly. I've just tested our uninstaller and it definitely does remove them. The only way these would reappear is if you ran OBS again or re-ran our installer afterward.

[igor725]

Yes, uninstaller removed them. But when I restarted my PC hook registered itself again, without installed OBS.

[RytoEX]

There is no mechanism at all in OBS that re-copies these files with a PC restart. Even if there was, this is not possible if OBS is not installed. I've just tested this by uninstalling OBS, verifying that the files are gone, restarting my PC, and verifying that the files are still gone.

[igor725]

Well, I literally just recorded a video how it magically appears in my ProgramData directory after I restart my system. And I have no OBS installed atm.

[igor725]

Probably some other app installs it, but it's weird behavior for something that is not OBS actually...

[igor725]

Well, thank you for the answer. I'll dig this thing further.

[igor725]

I still don't know what app is doing it, but I created a file named obs-studio-hook in ProgramData folder. Looks like it won't happen anymore and my vulkan layers list is clean too, so I'm probably okay with that

[igor725]

Well, Process Hacker says System process writes these files. Now this is weird...

[RytoEX]

I'm pretty sure escalation/admin privileges are required to copy to ProgramData, so that doesn't seem too unusual. If you have any other software that does screen recording, streaming, game clipping, replay saving, or anything similar, especially things set to run on system start (or things that have helpers that run on system start, or things that have services), I would look at those.

[igor725]

I have only two apps for this task - ShareX (it uses ffmpeg with ddgrab API) and NVIDIA GeForce Experience. There is literally no more recording things on me. Thank you for your time and answers, but I probably just leave obs-studio-hook file there, just checked annd this approach has no side effects. Whatever this app is, it trying to install hook only once at startup and doesn't try to do this in infinite loop.

[ALCR3W]

In my case that folder is created by Discord. It seems strange to me, but maybe it was created for screen sharing