prey
Prey Check scheduled task failing on Windows
Hello, I noticed a tiny error with the 'Prey Check' scheduled task on Windows (10 22H2)
With the Program/Script box within the Action tab filled in as it was originally, Windows did not seem to know how to interpret the command 😅 - visible in Task Manager as an OpenWith.exe under the SYSTEM user with the C:\WINDOWS\Prey\current\bin\fenix.exe -check-winsvc command line.
This was rectified by moving the -check-winsvc to the Add arguments box in Task Scheduler.
Thank you for that fix! It may be a tiny error, but it has caused me hours of work, I ultimately uninstalled Prey on a Server 2025 machine to stop the errors. Now I found it is still present in the latest Prey version 1.13.18 and with the latest Windows 11 24H2.
Notes and screenshots, including the Task Manager workaround:
https://www.mcbsys.com/blog/2025/04/prey-project-causes-repeated-openwith-errors-on-server-2025/
I'm glad this report could be of use to someone, and that is a very thorough writeup 😅
I disabled the task and left it like that as it seemed to revert to the incorrect format after Prey updates. After coming back to this I made a similar but separate task that executes on logon.
After a few hours of troubleshooting, I was able to identify the same issue on my Windows 11 notebook that was tracked to Prey causing an openwith.exe error every 6 hours. The suggestion above resolved my issue as well. This seems to be a simple fix, and I’m guessing that the error is more widespread but unnoticed to people who don’t check windows error logs. I hope that PreyProject will look at this for a future fix. I am running the most current version of Prey.
Hello!
Sorry for the late response! We worked in this particular issue and now wpxsvc.exe doesn't create the task called "Prey Check" in Windows, but if you have ever used Prey before, even if you uninstalled and installed the newest version which doesn't have that wpxsvc.exe which doesn't create that task, you can still have it since it doesn't delete by itself nor in the uninstallation process.
We are working right now in a new version for wpxsvc.exe (2.0.29) which will include a way to delete "Prey Check" task automatically so you won't encounter that error again.
I hope you guys have a wonderful day.
Thank you for the response. So, it sounds like you are conveying that this Windows Task Scheduler task is not necessary, and the entry should just be deleted rather than repaired. Is that correct?
Hello again!
@01JMS yes! Exactly. You can just delete it and it won't affect Prey software at all.