So, I am a gamer, and tend to play lots of games fullscreen.
At least once per day/session, my game will minimize, showing my desktop. It will always happen twice- minimize, bring it back up, followed by a second minimization maybe 10-15 seconds later. I have zero idea what causes this; no other application seems to be going, and I’ve even had ProcessHacker going in the background to see if a process is starting and terminating (it will give you an alert if that happens).
This is on Windows 10, and virus/malware scans are clean.
Any ideas for the best way to track down what might be causing it?
Have you tried running in borderless fullscreen (fake fullscreen)? It might be a notification that’s trying to pop up but failing to draw over the full screen. Borderless lets you see normal windows/popups, maybe giving you a hint. If it’s a Windows notification (update, reboot, Defender, general Microsoft shenanigans), it might not spawn a new process…
Does it happen with more than one different game?
Did it just begin happening at some point, or has it always done this?
Do you have multiple monitors? if so, does it happen on just one of them or both? Does it still occur when you completely disconnect the second display?
My guess would be something graphics-adaptor related - driver or potentially some kind of hardware failure - either causing the display to briefly change mode or resolution, or making the computer think that the monitor connection has changed or been interrupted.
If the problem manifests on multiple different games, and began abruptly, look in Device Manager and check when your graphics drivers were updated - consider rolling back the driver, or go to the manufacturer of the graphics board and get the official driver (maybe try the very latest version - or maybe try a version dated before the point when your problem started)
This recently started happening to me too.
It only happened on two games - Dishonored: Death of the Outsider and LA Noire.
It only happened once per session. At some point, I would click the mouse, and the game would suddenly minimize.
Windows 10, clean result for malware/viruses.
I will check to see if either of them are running in Borderless Fullscreen. Even though there’s no in-game cursor, I wonder if somehow the cursor is managing to escape the boundary of the game window, and then when I click, it switches focus to the desktop.
Then when I click on the icon and use Alt-Enter, it’s then in true fullscreen and the same thing won’t happen again in that session.
That’ll happen if a program running in the background quickly opens and closes a new window.
Basically, if a window opens that you can’t see, Windows will minimize your fullscreen window so you can see the new window that appeared. (Presumably on the assumption that it’s important.) Since you’re not seeing a window after your game minimizes, this means some application is opening a window then quickly closing it.
I’ve noticed a lot of really lazy programs by lazy software developers who should be fired do this. Because they’re lazy, they want to use a CMD or PowerShell command to do some work, and they’re too lazy to look up how to create a console in memory (which is, like, maybe 2 lines of code, max.) So what they do instead is tell Explorer.exe to run the program by feeding it the program’s commandline-- then Explorer.exe pops open the script window, it does its thing, and it closes again before the user even notices.
The lazy developer in his office says, “well look you don’t even notice the window opened it’s so quick, what a clever fellow I am saving all that work”, but of course never bothers to actually test his software before shipping it, and you end up… well, where we started.
There’s two solutions:
Track down the program popping open windows at intervals, kill it with extreme prejudice, and write an angry letter to the company that provided it
Get into the habit of running your games in “Fullscreen (Windowed)” mode. That means the game tells the OS it’s just a normal window like Word or Excel instead of a fullscreen app, and Windows won’t minimize it to show you new windows anymore.