installed ESET Internet Security 2 months ago, always automatically installed the latest updates (so most likely 12.1.30 installed before 12.1.31), and didn't have this problem until a few days ago.
thought it was a "Display Notification/Alert" issue so I turned those off for a bit but I still had this problem.
what's odd is that after reading Marcos' post I went into Task Manager > Details tab, saw egui.exe was running and then it spontaneously ended and removed itself from Task Manager and I haven't had this popping up problem since.