At some point in the past several months, probably after a Windows 10 update, my PC started to display a cryptic and annoying dialog box every time I logged in. I started wondering if somehow, a virus had gotten into my computer. I hadn’t spent the time to figure out what it was causing it, and how to get rid of it, until today. A google search of “Smoni Failed to create empty document” didn’t yield any useful results. It’s so annoying to go through Microsoft forums, and find the that the only advice they can give you is reset or restore your system. No thanks. It’s a lot easier to spend a little time troubleshooting on my own, than spending hours backing up and reloading all my programs and files.
I pulled up the Task Manager, scanned the running process list, and quickly found the culprit:
Aha! What’s this BrnlPMon process? Simply right click on BrnlPMon, and select Open File Location from the menu:
Windows then pops up a File Explorer window, with the offending file highlighted:
Hmm.. so what’s BRNIPMON.exe? Right click the file, and select Properties from the context menu. Select the Details tab on the resultant pop-up window:
Bingo! It’s Brother IP Monitor, which I figured out is monitoring software for my Brother WiFi connected laser printer. Something in my recent Windows 10 updates (probably the new Creator’s Edition), caused an incompatibility, which triggers this stupid error dialog.
At this point, I could just uninstall it or delete the files, but since I now know that it isn’t malicious, I’ll just leave it for now, and look for a software update when I have time, and see if that fixes the issue.