In this paper, we study operators for which T ∗ T and T + T ∗ commute. Let Θ denote the class of such operators in L(H). We show that every operator in Θ is subscalar of order 4. From this result, we give partial solutions to the invariant subspace problem. In addition, we examine some extensions of operators in Θ. Finally, we prove that if T belongs to Θ, then Weyl’s theorem holds for T and the spectral mapping theorem corresponding to the Weyl spectrum is satisfied for T . Let H be a complex separable Hilbert space and let L(H) denote the algebra of all bounded linear operators on H .I fT ∈L (H), then we write σ(T ), σp(T ), σap(T ), and σe(T ) for the spectrum, the point spectrum, the approximate point spectrum, and the essential spectrum of T , respectively. The notation r(T ) is used for the spectral radius of T . An operator S ∈L (H) is called scalar of order m (0 m ∞) if it possesses a spectral distribution of order m, that is, if there exists a continuous unital homomorphism of topological algebras Φ: C m 0 (C) −→ L (H)