Academic

Did some more hunting around tonight, and apparently it's a known bug in Stardock's "Fences" desktop organizer program. They're working on a fix, but for now, apparently uninstalling Fences solves it (I haven't tried this myself, I'm just sayin'...)

If nothing else, I can tell you that you're not alone. My computer has started doing the exact same thing, and you're right, it's only in the last couple of weeks. It's relatively harmless, but certainly annoying when you're doing something simple like a Ctrl-C, and those windows pop up. Let's hope somebody has some ideas on how to solve it...