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Recently when I play mult-player WiC every 20 minutes or so the screen will auto-minimize back to desktop, disrupting gameplay. I've shut off nonessential background programs and it still keeps happening. What could be the reason for this?

Are you using a firewall? It might be trying to steal focus away from WiC when it detects online activity, although it should show a window or message of some sort.

Also, make sure you're not accidentally hitting any key combinations that might minimize the window while playing.

Yeah, it can be all too easy to hit alt-tab or the start/windows/super key.

LordOskuro wrote:Are you using a firewall? It might be trying to steal focus away from WiC when it detects online activity, although it should show a window or message of some sort.

Also, make sure you're not accidentally hitting any key combinations that might minimize the window while playing.

The only firewall I use is the one with XP, and as far as I know the only keys I use on the keyboard are the typical directional FPS style keys (WASD) and special weapons, never the shift, ctl or alt keys. I had heard that malware could be signaling in the background, but I'm not sure if that's the case atm.

I had this exactly same problem, only it was with left 4 dead 2 and it turned out that my virus scanner was involved in some tom-foolery. You might want to extend your search for the culprit to your 'scanner, especially if you happen to use AVG 9.

Interesting call, Coaan; I'm coming up with the same problem when I have Dragon Age open; regular alt-tab-to-desktop. Given that, now that I think about it, it all started when I installed the update to AVG 9.0, I think I can safely say that I'm going to give that program a hard look when I get home.

Isn't there a way to tell windows to give a program priority so its focus cannot be stolen? If tehre isn't, there should be, there are way too many programs that believe we are interested in what they have to say, even if it is just a crappy splash image with the company logos.

No, there's no way to tell windows that a given program should never be able to get it's focus stolen. A bit of thinking will reveal why the idea is retarded (though admittedly not at first glance)

Lagmonster wrote:Interesting call, Coaan; I'm coming up with the same problem when I have Dragon Age open; regular alt-tab-to-desktop. Given that, now that I think about it, it all started when I installed the update to AVG 9.0, I think I can safely say that I'm going to give that program a hard look when I get home.

Thanks for the hint, I took a look at my AVG 9.0 and saw that the gaming mode was active, so I turned it off and things are normal now. Hadn't realized that the AVG update could cause such an annoying problem.

Beowulf wrote:No, there's no way to tell windows that a given program should never be able to get it's focus stolen. A bit of thinking will reveal why the idea is retarded (though admittedly not at first glance)

Ok, I'll bite, why is it? Wait, is it because some unscrupulous prgrammers might find a way to make their software inmune to it? Because that happens already with some fullscreen apps (games mostly). Heck, I remember that in order to be able to Alt-Tab out of Quake 3's engine (in RTCW) you had to install an special app and run it in the background
So, if that's not it, then why? (I honestly would like to know)

You cant see the harm in some malware being able to have total access to the computer and nothing else is allowed to have cpu time?

Being unable to alt tab is not the same as the program not ever giving up focus.

Steel wrote:You cant see the harm in some malware being able to have total access to the computer and nothing else is allowed to have cpu time?

Being unable to alt tab is not the same as the program not ever giving up focus.

Focus != scheduler time. The windows scheduler does give a priority boost to the current foreground window, but that's not an exclusive lock on CPU time.

But just to give my answer to the question, imagine malware X wants to take over your screen, and you can't do anything about it?

If you were going to set focus why not have a key combo to force un-focus whatever is currently up? The best system would be when you start a game a box pops up and it asks set focus [yes] [no] and you can either set it as focus so nothing else can pop up or say no and play as normal.

Ace Pace wrote:But just to give my answer to the question, imagine malware X wants to take over your screen, and you can't do anything about it?

As I said, I don't need to imagine said scenario. Sometimes, when a game launches and is displaying its splash screen, ZoneAlarm will freeze execution to warn me about said program trying to acess the internet, but since I can't alt-tab out of the splash screen, I have to either try my luck blindly using the keyboard to tab into the "accept" button, or worse yet, reset the system and configure ZA before launch (Task Manager doesn't override it either).

There are also many non-fullscreen splash screens and confirmation dialogs that you can't send into the background, even if you hit the Show Desktop button.

Really, seeing how you can manually alter the CPU priority of a given process, something that can be potentially disastrous, I fail to see why can't you, through the task manager or properties window, set a given program to never lose focus (We understand focus as being in the foreground/maximized, not CPU focus). Oh well. Maybe there is an option but I'm not aware of it.

Fullscreen splash screens are the goddamn devil. A lot of things (like changed/patched exes, firewalls, alerts, etc) can popup invisibly and halt the program.

Norade wrote:If you were going to set focus why not have a key combo to force un-focus whatever is currently up? The best system would be when you start a game a box pops up and it asks set focus [yes] [no] and you can either set it as focus so nothing else can pop up or say no and play as normal.

Anything can be faked by a sufficiently malicious program, including your keyboard clicks.