Yesterday I forgot to test it but today - no more hiccup!

Congratulations. Well done!

YES! Whew, glad this got figured out for you! Took all of us, I think!

Update: the issue seems to be solved but I tried to replicate the glitch. I spawned a Virtual Machine ( Win 10 ) and installed the free CCleaner and began re-playing some Starcraft 1. ( gaming on Virtual Machines is generally horrible but Starcraft 1 is not very demanding so no problem there ).

Anyway there was no 5:30 hickup but at 5:25 PM local time the game totally froze. Had to restart the VM. Might have been a coincidence. The rest of the time the game plays just fine. I'll make an other attempt some other day.

Why do you want to replicate it?

Fogfighter, I thought about doing that too! Interesting coincidence!

Just curiosity. Interesting to see if a virtual machine with the CCleaner behaves similar.
I have also never tried the CCleaner before.

Please let us know if you make the test.

I'm probably not going to have time, Fogfighter! I'm buried in tomatoes right now!

The CCleaner had been on my system for some time but the hiccuping was more recent so it must have been triggered for some reason, not just that it was installed on my system - and not that easily replicated then.

Now I am also having this issue again every night at 9:47. It never ends with this computer. All I can see in the Event Viewer at that time everyday is Event ID 10016 from Distributed COM, something about permissions. I Googled it and it seems to be something normal. Don't know if that is why my games get minimized every night at that time.

In a couple of searches, it seems like this is really common, but nothing to worry about. So some service is trying to connect to a remote server, but doesn't have the required permissions. Got no idea what that that means or what service it would be!

"Should You Worry About DCOM Errors?
In most cases, DCOM errors, including Event ID 10016, do not affect the functionality of your system. They often occur in the background and are logged when a service tries to connect to a remote server but lacks the required permissions. Unless you are experiencing connectivity issues or specific application failures, these errors can generally be ignored."

And I found this on a Microsoft Learn website:

Cancel that thought. I'm getting confused with my two open threads here.

I love the "don't spend too much time in the Event Viewer!" That is a fact!

See if this helps, oldbroad.

https://windowsloop.com/disable-microsoft-compatibility-telemetry-compattelrunner-exe/