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Ctfmon.exe is simply part of Microsoft Office.
What is ctfmon.exe?
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Ctfmon is a part of Microsoft Office. From the Microsoft Knowledgebase:
"What Is the Ctfmon.exe (Ctfmon.exe) File?
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Ctfmon.exe activates the Alternative User Input Text Input Processor (TIP) and the Microsoft Office Language Bar.
What Does the Ctfmon.exe File Do?
Ctfmon.exe monitors the active windows and provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies."
You can read the entire knowledgebase article, which includes instructions on disabling Ctfmon: What Is CTFMON and What Does It Do?
Article C2136 - July 24, 2004
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
My computer becomes very slow and when i look in running processes there is he again ctfmon.exe. I
Posted by: cooper at April 18, 2009 1:20 AMI remove it from running process and my computer works again. But 20 minutes later he is back and my computer becomes slow again.
I remove it from the start up and it adds it self back again.
I am sure its a virus. Help!
Can you help me? Some time ago Spybot came up with a message that "CTFMON.EXE was replaced by CTFMON.exe.
Posted by: Mary at May 4, 2009 12:05 AMI rejected the change but my laptop seems to freeze up and locks the keyboard and touch pad. I used to remove the plug and when the battery was low and the low battery message appeared the laptop un-freezed and then I could put the plug back in and work normally on electricity power.
Now my battery is completely dead and I cannot use the computer as it runs on electric power only and after boot it locks the keyboard and touch pad. It runs on safe mode without problems, but I have no idea what to do to make it run properly.
Please help.
Amazing how the number of different possible configurations lead to so many different possible solutions. I am running XP Pro, SP3 and MS Office 2007. My problems from CTFMON began suddenly and not after loading anything on my system--it had been stable for months. At first, I could not use most MS applications (IE7, Office 2007). I tried the KB solution as others had suggested but I did not have those particular options/features visible in order to disable them.
Eventually I had to uninstall/reinstall Office 2007. This allowed me to use MS applications but I still had start up errors with CTFMON. I tried using the Control Panel/Regional Language options solution but kept getting an error message (some Shell and rundll errors) when I attempted to click on the Details button on the Language tab! The only thing that worked for me, at this point at least, was to disable CTFMON in startup. I know that hasn't worked for everyone, but such are the joys of computing these days! If I ever need to get into those advanced language options, I know I'll need to work on other solutions but, for now, everything is finally working again.
Best of luck to all!
Posted by: HHG222 at August 30, 2009 7:08 AMThanks for the article! More about ctfmon here: http://www.fileinspect.com/fileinfo/ctfmon-exe.
Posted by: Lisa at January 13, 2010 9:26 AMI don't even have MS Office installed (I used Openoffice from the first day of install) but I still have ctfmon.exe running, how is that possible. Currently my XP sp3 runs for unspecified number of hours/days without issues, but applications suddenly start hanging one after the other, so I reboot the moment I see the first hang, and guess what, ctfmon.exe is always hanging. Not sure if it is also hanging for the same reason as the other apps, or if it is the root cause of the OS hang. I will see if uninstalling it will help with the stability and report back.
Posted by: Irha at February 13, 2010 12:22 PM