The Christmas.exe in Task Manager and the Christmas wreath banner that covers half of your screen on Windows 11 are not malware but a new promotional campaign by ASUS on some PCs. It’s driving many people crazy, and it looks like whoever approved this campaign didn’t realize that it has the potential to do severe damage.

Please don’t freak out if you boot to the Windows 11 desktop today or you’re in the middle of a game and there’s a large banner wishing you Christmas with wreath. The banner, which covers 1/4th of the screen, is not malware but a new Asus promotion. Even worse, the malware-looking Christmas wreath is linked to a process called “Christmas.exe.”

A couple of people reached out to Windows Latest to ask me if I were aware of a potential new malware that has a Christmas wreath at the bottom of the screen and an associated process called “Christmas.exe” It turns out that this is not malware, but a part of the ASUS Armoury Crate software that is pre-installed on some ASUS PCs.

ASUS uses it to display a holiday-themed splash screen, but this time, they didn’t clearly brand it or explain what’s even happening in the below situation.

As shown in the above screenshot, what we have is a Windows desktop with a blue Windows 11 background (Bloom). At the bottom of the screen, there is a Christmas wreath with festive lights and a red button in the center.

It also has a message saying, “Press ESC to exit.”

If you look closely, there’s a space button as well.

Christmas wreath banner on Windows 11 is insanely stupid. Christmas.exe makes it worse

As reported by several users in a forum post first spotted by Windows Latest, as soon as some people turned on their ASUS PC, a black bar showed up at the bottom of the screen with a Christmas wreath.

The wreath banner is so unpolished and poorly designed that it initially appears to be a part of a game or some malware. If you go to the Task Manager, you’ll notice that the whole banner is linked to a process named “Christmas.exe”.

Many of our readers thought that they’d been hacked or were being ransomware, especially since Christmas-themed malware is real.

What’s interesting is that the banner disappears on its own and doesn’t even show up in the Task Manager unless you keep it open.

“We’re back at it again. This time the banner not only covered part of the screen, but also caused a RAM leak. I was only able to close it through the task manager,” one of the frustrated users noted. “Brilliant, Asus, to congratulate your customers with some kind of virus.”

“What is wrong with you, Asus? I disconnected my internet opened the file location of Christmas.exe from the process in Task Manager and seen it was in the Asus folder in Program Data. First, Google was some old worm from years ago with the same name,” another user noted.

As shown in the above screenshot, Christmas.exe is located in the ASUS folder, and its size is about 106 KB.

While digging further, we also observed that it’s a common practice during the holiday season, but the campaign was worse this year than the previous ones.

For those unaware, in the ASUS armoury crate, when you open Aura, Aura effects, then you’ll also see a festive event option. This “feature” or Malware is related to the toggle.

It automatically goes away after the holiday.

Have you also seen one of these banners? Let us know in the comments below.

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