Coming to work on this lovely rainy morning, I turned on my PC and started running my usual applications, only to get a memory usage error message for ‘ctfmon.exe’. Now as an everyday PC user, I’m quite accustomed to having issues with my PC (who hasn’t had the normal.dot file issue?), so I didn’t get alarmed and decided to look up just what this ‘ctfmon.exe’ file was.
Turns out it activates the Alternative User Input Text Input Processor (TIP) and the Microsoft Office Language Bar. As Microsoft explain in their support page, this actually means it monitors the active windows and provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies. Even though you may think that ‘ctfmon.exe’ is useless, Microsoft warn against uninstalling it from your PC, as this may cause unexpected behaviour.
What you can do though is uninstall the alternative user input feature from all text services. This is a lengthy process though, so you really have to be sure that you want to get rid of ‘ctfmon.exe’. Follow the step by step run through from Microsoft on their support page to remove it completely from your PC.
