Windows 7 Keeps Making Windows Inactive

wnolan1992

OK, this is a weird problem so I'm just gonna spew as much detail as possible about what's happening and hope for the best.

Basically, I could be typing in Google Chrome (like I'm doing now) and suddenly the cursor will just vanish. The window title bar changes to show the window is longer active (in focus?). This can happen even if I'm just scrolling down a page, suddenly it'll just stop scrolling until I click back in.

This happens with all programs - Windows Explorer, mIRC, Steam, games I'm playing in full screen mode will minimise themselves...

What makes this even more odd is that after this happens, when I hit Alt+Tab, the program that I was using is still the first on the left, so it doesn't appear that it's switching to another program or the desktop...

The problem occurs randomly. As in, I could go an entire session without this happening once, and other times it'll happen every 30 seconds, making the machine nigh on unusable. It also seems to get worse if the laptop goes to sleep mode and is then turned back on.

It also seems to escalate. After a while of this happening, it gets to a point where every time Chrome (or another program) gets made inactive, the screen goes black, as if a screen saver has been activated.

All drivers are up to date. I've ran MalwareBytes and McAffe virus scans, both showing nothing.

Any suggestions as to what I could try would be welcome. This is beginning to drive me insane.

Capt'n Midnight

Try safe mode in case background app

try a different mouse / turn off trackpad

Fysh

Are you using an AMD graphics card by any chance? I'm sure I used to see this issue on my old box with a Radeon HD 3450 as the primary card - the Win7 drivers for it were shoddy for ages, so the Windows dwm.exe (Display Window Manager) would end up restarting very often, which resulted in a lack of stability for everything else.

wnolan1992

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Try safe mode in case background app

try a different mouse / turn off trackpad

The problem doesn't seem to happen in Safe Mode, so I take it it's a problem with something I've installed?

Tried unplugging the mouse and just using the touchpad, problem still happening.

Couldn't figure out how to fully disable the touchpad, but I turned off the tapping setting so it couldn't click, no good.

Fysh wrote: »

Are you using an AMD graphics card by any chance? I'm sure I used to see this issue on my old box with a Radeon HD 3450 as the primary card - the Win7 drivers for it were shoddy for ages, so the Windows dwm.exe (Display Window Manager) would end up restarting very often, which resulted in a lack of stability for everything else.

No, it's a nVidia card. How would I go about checking dwm.exe just to see if it is the problem?

wnolan1992

Something's just occurred to me. Probably a stupid question but indulge me, the laptop has a nVidia GT630M built in, but in my system tray Intel HD Graphics is showing up. Is there a possibility that Intel is interfering with nVidia and causing this problem?

Fysh

Intel HD graphics are integrated into the CPU, whereas the Nvidia GPU will be a discrete adapter built onto your laptop's motherboard.

It might be a graphics driver issue - do you have the latest Nvidia drivers for your laptop installed?

To see if DWM is restarting regularly and causing the issue (which can be caused by flaky drivers, amongst other things), your best bet is a combination of checking the Event Viewer logs and using the Sysinternals Process Explorer to see exactly what's happening on your machine, and try to narrow it down that way.

wnolan1992

Turns out I didn't have the latest nVidia drivers after all... downloading now.

Event Viewer won't start for me for some reason, keeps saying "event viewer has stopped working..."

Though after staring at processes in Task Manager for about an hour, I am starting to suspect it could be McAffe antivirus that's causing this. So I'm going to try uninstalling that if the nVidia update doesn't help. Will report back.

_Kaiser_

I had the same problem last week with Chrome losing focus after a few seconds.. extremely annoying!

Did the usual uninstall/reinstall of Chrome, close everything else, end tasks etc but no joy.

In the end I rolled it back a week through System Restore and all has been well since - must have been an iffy Windows Update or something.

(Vostro 3350 with integrated Intel 3000 & an ATI chipset, Win 7 x64)

wnolan1992

I'm cautiously optimistic that uninstalling McAffe antivirus has solved the problem...

Been working for about thirty minutes without the issue occurring now, which is the longest it's been all week, so hopefully....

Really odd if it was McAffe causing it, I've had zero problems with it on my other laptop which is also running Win7 64bit...


Cheers for the help guys, hopefully I won't be back asking for more suggestions in an hour. :pac: