active window temporarily loses focus - why?

[BillLumbergh]

I'm running Windows 2000 Professional on my machine at work. I've noticed this thing where whatever window is active, every 60 seconds or so, it loses focus for a split second and then regains focus. The way I can see it is that the titlebar turns grey very briefly before returning to blue, meaning that it is active once again, or if I am typing something, for the time that it loses focus, the characters that I have typed during the period of lost focus do not get typed into the application. So I know for certain that I am losing focus, but I know that I am not doing anything to lose the focus, like clicking off the active window or selecting another application.

Has anyone ever seen this and know what causes it, or how to stop it from happening?

Thank you in advance for any explanation.

 

[d3crypt4]

I've heard of a few weird things happening but not related and not exactly like this. May I suggest something - leave Task Manager open and sorted on CPU time. When whatever it is hits your machine for that second, it should jump to the top of the list and reveal itself. It's a boring prospect staring at TaskMan for minutes on end, but it's the easiest way to check for it!

Once we know what it is, we can set about teaching it some manners..

 

[orejas]

How do I teach it manners? Eudora steals my focus permanently EVERY time it checks mail.

 

[d3crypt4]

I would suggest waiting until you know which proram does this Bill, or you may never find out. Of course, it may never matter.

There's registry editing to be done in Manners School - be warned to take a back-up first!

- Run REGEDT32 and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop.
- Edit (or add, if it doesn't exist) the following REG_DWORD keys to your liking:
ForegroundLockTimeout. Set it to a decimal value of 60000 (60 seconds) or whatever you prefer, which will keep the program from assuming focus for that length of time.
ForegroundFlashCount: Set it to 0 (decimal or DWORD), so that the taskbar icon flashes continuously until it's clicked (or any numerical value if you want to specify a number of flashes) when an application is trying to steal focus.


Log out and back in again, and your machine will have had it's lesson in manners.

 

[BillLumbergh]

I've watched the Task Manager extensively and I can't seem to get it to happen when I'm looking for it. I guess it doesn't happen every 60 seconds, sometimes it seems like it happens pretty regularly, like 60 seconds, but sometimes it does not seem to happen for quite long periods. I think it may be virus scanning software that is running periodically. I guess I don't so much care that it is happening as I want to know why. I've developed this little theory, paranoid as it may seem, that it is some sort of tracking software installed on my machine to monitor what I am doing. My machine was imaged pretty recently; another guy I work with has a pretty new image and his does the same thing; the half dozen or so others in my area with older images don't have this issue, of course, all that means is that it could be any software that we have that they do not, which again could be something like a virus scanner. All I'm trying to do is figure it out; but I watched the Task Manager for some time without it happening, so I guess I give up, is there anything else I can do?

Thanks.

 

[d3crypt4]

I know that Norton grabs focus a lot, especially if it's set to scan e-mails. Worth checking that. The only other thing you could do is either wait until it starts and then bring up Task Manager and watch to see if it does it again, or maybe just do the change I detailed above so that whatever it is it doesn't bother you again.

Most occurrences of an irregular nature are caused by things like mail arriving or network issues etc.. - as such, it's hard to advise you what to monitor...