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Game's minimizing to desktop for no apparent reason.

Cheese4Everyone

Cheese4Everyone

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So recently while playing Team Fortress 2, CS:GO, Skyrim, and The Witcher 2 I've been experiencing a rather annoying bug; for some unknown reason I'll be playing the game and then suddenly it will minimize to my desktop. This often results in my in game death and or inability to restart the game without a ctrl+alt+delete forced shutdown.

Things I Know So Far:
-Running the game in windowed fullscreen mode does not seem to have an effect
-Re-enabling/Disabling Microsoft OneNote (I've had previous problems with this piece of shit) has no effect
-All Graphics and BIOS drivers are currently up to date
-I'm unable to locate and malware or rootkits on my system (Multiple Scans with AVG, Spybot, and GERM)
-I've looked through my task scheduler and was couldn't find any triggers that seemed related
-Using the Microsoft Process Monitor I've been able to collect a list of all processes before and immediately after the instance.
(Drop Box link to process log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/h8y2gdh7tdo72b6/Logfile.PML ) it's rather long I'm sorry if you scroll to the bottom and then head to around 5:58:20 you should see around the time the game "crashed" though there are micro instances of the Witcher2.exe process later on.

Any help would be appreciated, this issue is rendering me nearly unable to play for any period of time longer than 10 minutes.
 
I know GMOD likes to do this if the window loses focus... Is something popping up dialogs that is making your games minimize?

Don't know about all of those specifically but some games simply don't like losing focus and on my desktop, tf2 can take a good 15+ seconds to recover from it.
 
VintagePC said:
I know GMOD likes to do this if the window loses focus... Is something popping up dialogs that is making your games minimize?

Don't know about all of those specifically but some games simply don't like losing focus and on my desktop, tf2 can take a good 15+ seconds to recover from it.
Click to expand...

Nope no dialogs or anything visible on the desktop that would suggest what program was doing it.
 
Lookin the the log I've noticed alot of activity from both AVG and my Steel Series Engine (The program that support my mouses custom settings and what not) just prior two and after the crash. Immediately after the crash Dwm.exe is the first process to appear...
 
It doesn't necessarily have to be a dialog you'll see. Good example is spybot, way back when I used to have it, the TeaTimer system tray part of it would pop up notices on registry changes all the time, and they'd vanish again without needing to be dismissed.

DWM is the process that handles windows desktop effects (Aero) which may be related to the problem... have you tried disabling them?
 
VintagePC said:
It doesn't necessarily have to be a dialog you'll see. Good example is spybot, way back when I used to have it, the TeaTimer system tray part of it would pop up notices on registry changes all the time, and they'd vanish again without needing to be dismissed.

DWM is the process that handles windows desktop effects (Aero) which may be related to the problem... have you tried disabling them?
Click to expand...

Disabling which? Is it safe to disable DWM? I'm also somewhat suspicious of my printer...HP is notorious for shitty drivers...
 
You can right click a shortcut to set launch options; tick the box to disable desktop effects.

http://superuser.com/questions/266323/disable-aero-on-run-application

I'd suggest creating a new user account to see if the problem follows to it but unfortunately in a windows environment that might be of limited diagnostic value, since nearly everything is installed as admin by default.
 
sorry, not right now. :(
 
I see nothing unusual or concerning in there.
 
could be avg just popping up saying it has updated as their notifications disappear if you move the mouse so that might be it and knowing avg it loves to update several times a day
 
Yes, I've been trying to avoid tangling with AVG until now as it is a bitch to remove. However I do believe it is time.
 
So I've uninstalled "most" of AVG and installed Avast instead. When I say most it's because this pesky AVG "vport" claims it's still running and therefor can be removed.

Any ideas?
 
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