Fixing the Qttask.exe No Disk Error…
Every now and then when I am sitting at my Windows XP system, an annoying error message just pops up out of nowhere. The title bar is a seemingly random four-digit hexadecimal value followed by “qttask.exe - No Disk”. The text of the message says “There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive XX:.” At the bottom is the typical Cancel, Try Again, and Continue buttons.
The most annoying thing is that none of the button choices do anything to actual remove the error. The error message cycles back and forth showing an error message first for drive XX:, then for drive YY:, back and forth, over and over, at least 16 times.
Yes, that’s right — 16 times!!
That’s when I decided to do something about it.
But before I destroyed it, I had to find out more about it.
The qttask.exe program is a simple program that lets Apple’s QuickTime software (often bundled with iTunes) show up in the Windows taskbar. To me, the taskbar only needs to store the system’s volume control and be a place where I get a visual indication when I get mail. To hëll with everything else!
You’ll find solutions all over the ‘net that tell you (1) which registry entry to edit to stop qttask; (2) what option in the Control Panel to set; (3) to deselect the checkbox within the QuickTime software that says to display the control in the toolbar; (4) to remove and reinstall. None of that advice really matters or works. You think simply deselecting the checkbox will actually stop it from running in stealth mode?! Ha! Sooner or later, just like that bad apple MSN Messenger (that uses Microsoft’s own questionable sticky tactics), qttask will also eventually pop back.
The solution: Use the Task Manager to end the qttask process. Rename the qttask.exe file in your QuickTime directory to something else; you can even delete it as it is not used to play or view any QuickTime-associated data. Reboot. Simple!
My instruction to “simply rename the qttask.exe file in your QuickTime directory to something else” stands since not everyone installs QuickTime into their Program Files directory. I sure don’t. But I’m glad the solution worked for you! Cheers! - RDL
I too got rid of Qttask.exe which has actually stopped the message popping up at random. clearing the recent history in quicktime also helps but after a while the error comes back after watching a few movies when actualy launchin quicktime. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just once but it’s about 16 times at once.
Thanks Richard. I tried the renaming strategy and the annoying message is gone (It has been one week now!)
I developed this same annoying problem after udating my Quicktime on XP Pro. I renamed the qttask.exe to qttask1.exe as suggested,rebooted and it worked like a charm. Thanks so much for all the info.
Same problem-same simple solution- you are awesome!
I echo the thanks above. Worked great for me as well!
Hey, thanks for the fix. Here’s everything Apple has on this problem: “Your search for All Documents containing qttask.exe returned no results. Please search again or try our Guided Search.”
Renaming or deleting Qttask.exe did nothing to fix the annoying popup box on my system. I did what one user suggested above… go to file/open recent and clear menu. That did the trick. I have also found a program called Media Player Classic that works great with .mov files and pretty much all other video files. Get it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli
Getting rid of QTtask and removing it from my msconfig startup did not fix this problem, only clearing the recent files did it. Yes, I had rebooted and everything, I’ve done this pretty thoroughly. Getting rid of qttask seemed to temporarily curb the problem, but it came back and the file was still gone. As I said, clearing my recent files was the only way around the problem. I guess we all had played a movie file from a cd rom recently.
I did not have this problem but used exactly the same mechanism to stop that dratted M$ messenger.