What is WinVNC...

[rafletcher]

Can anybody elighten me? I installed ie8, and now I have an icon in the system tray for this application, and I have no idea what it is. Looks like a remote access tool, so maybe it's coincidental and our IT people have loaded it.

[Woofage]

It is a remote access tool. It allows admins to control your machine remotely.

[vorsprung]

VNC has "client" and "server" parts to it

The client allows the user to move their mouse and see the results back from a remote machine

The server is the control process on the remote machine.  There is no program much to interact with as far as the user is concerned.  I think it runs as a service on MS Windows and can be turned off like any other service.

If someone is running VNC server on your machine and using the client you may see the mouse pointer moving around under it's own steam and programs being opened etc as if by a ghost

[rafletcher]

Thanks guys.

[tonycollinet]

Would advise against constant running of the server as it is a serious security risk.

[TimO]

I'm not sure that VNC is any more a security risk than say Remote Desktop, but like any service or daemon, if you're not using it you should turn it off.

I would be a bit concerned about a VNC server which was installed without knowing about it, since one of the things you need to do when installing it is to set a password to allow access to your machine when required.  This means that it either doesn't have a password, which would be a huge security issue, or has one which you don't have a clue what it is, which isn't a lot of use.

[coll_coll]

if it's a work PC, IMHO IT will have installed it and set the password so that they can connect. Sometimes the client is configured so that even if they have the password, you still have to allow access when they try to connect.

If you do disable it, don't expect IT to be too helpful if you have a problem with your pc and they try to remote support you 

[TimO]

If it's a Windows box in a work environment, it's likely to be XP or newer, in which case Remote Desktop is installed.  Much as I like to have a go at Microsloth, Remote Desktop is better than VNC, and it's installed by default.  For most purposes Remote Desktop is more useful, and you wouldn't need VNC installed.