How to nail down which program is stealing focus all the time?

Since a few days I have a phenomen that starts driving me really nuts:

Some program seems to steal the keyboard focus every minute or so. That
means that while I am writing some text or email, again and again I am
suddenly typing into "nirvana" until I realize, that the application
*again* has lost its input focus. I then have to click with the mouse
into its window again to reassign focus and then I have to retype the
last couple of words. This is soooo distracting!

I guess it must be some utility that runs in the background and
regularly checks for something but I haven't been able to identify the
culprit so far. Apparently it always runs so shortly that it doesn't
show up in the task manager's top CPU list. Any idea, how I could list
the last couple of processes that ran?

I am starting to get mad due to this!!!

Michael

Swifty
Mon Apr 28 05:48:26 PDT 2008

Michael Moser wrote:
> Some program seems to steal the keyboard focus every minute or so. That
> means that while I am writing some text or email, again and again I am
> suddenly typing into "nirvana" until I realize, that the application
> *again* has lost its input focus.

If I had this problem, I would use "Process Explorer" (which you can
download from Microsoft these days) and use its ability to suspend
processes. I would sort the processes alphabetically, then suspend them
one at a time, waiting a couple of minutes. If the focus is still lost,
I resume that process and move on to the next. Eventually, you will
probably find the process that is involved. Of course, if the process
that is causing the problem is transient, being created then terminating
after it has stolen the focus, then you may not be able to find it.

TweakUI has a setting which prevents other applications from taking the
focus, but this causes problems when you want to launch a program and
have it take the focus.


--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

Stan
Mon Apr 28 19:26:48 PDT 2008

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:48:26 +0100 from Swifty
<Steve.J.Swift@gmail.com>:
> TweakUI has a setting which prevents other applications from taking the
> focus, but this causes problems when you want to launch a program and
> have it take the focus.

And it sometimes doesn't work, at least for me. AVG Free still grabs
focus three times in every update session.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
Shikata ga nai...