I forget the technical term for this - but sometimes one program will automatically take the focus of your system and display itself on top of anything you were working on without being commanded.
Anyway, when I switched from 98 to 2k, I remember that the problem seemed to dissapear - win2k didn’t acknowledge the programs’ request to steal focus.
However, lately, a few programs (most notably IE - maybe microsoft let’s it’s own software take priority?), but sometimes other programs, have been able to steal focus. Is there any way to absolutely disable this in win2k?
This is my main reason for using TweakUI on any 98 PC I use. I’m curious about the solution of setting the ForegroundLockTimeout to 200000 though… does this mean that the app will steal the focus after 200 seconds? Wouldn’t that be just as bad, only more confusing? Or is 200000 some magic number that means never? What happens if you set it to 200001?
Interestingly, 200000 appears to be the default setting in WinXP.
Basically, the “ForegroundLockTimeout” setting value (E.g. 0 or 200000) is the amount of time that must elapse after the last user input, before a program can steal focus. This means that if, for example, Internet Explorer tried to steal focus, it would only be allowed if the time limit had passed since the last user activity. If that time hadn’t yet passed, the dirty focus stealing would fail and IE would be restricted to flashing down on the taskbar.
The default is indeed set to 200000 (200 seconds) in Windows XP, but 0 in 2000 and 98.