To be fair, I'm not sure if the background applications are closing or not. I never did a ctrl-alt-delete to check the task manager. But here's what I'm experiencing. My computer, an i7 5820k overclocked to 4Ghz with dual GTX970 cards in SLI, after BOINC has been running for a few hours and I leave my computer unattended with the BOINC screen saver running... upon returning to my pc and logging back in, almost HALF of my system tray has been cleared. The little icons in the bottom right portion of my taskbar,... they've vanished.

Again, I need to be more aware of why this is-what applications exactly-and if the icon is just missing or if the application has been closed entirely. These are things I will watch for. I am running Windows 10 64 bit.

I may have an idea about what could be going on. The symptoms are those of a computer that wants to update so it tries to reboot to update windows, but cant close a program. so half or more of the applications.

but Im not receiving any messages from windows update.