Owners of a AMD ATI Radeon video card will notice the four processes ccc.exe, atiedxx.exe, atiesrxx.exe and mom.exe when they open up the Windows task manager.
Those processes are installed with the installation of the ATI Catalyst driver package for the Windows operating system.
But what are these processes doing or providing, and is it really necessary to have them running all the time on the computer system?
Atiedxx.exe and atiesrxx.exe are the AMD External Events Client Module and AMD External Events Service Module. Both processes are executed when the Windows Service AMD External Events Utility is started. This service was known as the ATI Hotkey Poller in Windows XP and Windows Vista.
The service is responsible for providing hotkey access to various ATI features. It is therefore recommended to disable the service if hotkeys are not used to manage ATI features.
Enter [services.msc] in the Windows start menu form or press [Windows R] to enter [services.msc] to open the services configuration menu.
Locate the AMD External Events Utility in the list of services. A double-click will open the properties of the service.
Make sure to change the startup type from Automatic to Disabled and to Stop the service in the same menu.
This will immediately stop the two processes atiedxx.exe and atiesrxx.exe from running on the computer system and since the startup type was changed to disabled, it will prevent the service from being started on Windows startup.
Disabling the service might produce rare problems on some systems that features like the overdrive functionality are no longer working. The service should be enabled again if problems occur.
CLIStart.exe is executed on startup of the computer system. It will start the processes ccc.exe and mom.exe which are used to provide access to Ati’s Catalyst Control Center.
Ccc.exe is described as the Catalyst Control Center: Host application and mom.exe as the Catalyst Control Center: Monitoring Program.
Disabling or removing CliStart.exe from the Windows startup list will stop ccc.exe and mom.exe from being loaded during system start. This is usually not a problem as the video drivers are loaded independently from these processes.
Opening the Catalyst Control Center will start those two processes immediately which makes it somewhat unnecessary to start ccc.exe and mom.exe on startup.
It is therefore recommended to disable clistart.exe from running on Windows startup. This can be achieved by typing in [msconfig.exe] in the Vista or Windows 7 start menu run box or by pressing [Windows R] and typing [msconfig.exe] in there.
The startup tab in the System Configuration window contains the startup entries. Some of them might be disabled already. All items with a checkmark are enabled and will be executed on system start. Removing the checkmark from Catalyst Control Center ensures that mom.exe and ccc.exe are not executed on system startup.
There should not be any problems related to disabling clistart.exe from running on system startup. Re-enabling the startup item is the fix if problems are encountered.
AMD Ati drivers run four different processes on a Windows system by default which are all not needed to operate the system. Our recommendation is therefor to disable them all to save up some computer memory.