something stealing focus windows process monitor

#Something stealing focus windows process monitor software

The next time I catch one I'm probably just going to start killing processes one by one and see if I can find it that way, but I'd rather be able to do something a little more. I've already tried just looking through Task Manager / Process Explorer to see if anything jumps out as an obvious culprit just by what's currently running, but it's not obvious. But so far I haven't had any luck with any methods I've tried to identify the current active window, remotely. Obviously anything I try to do at the system is going to cause me to take active focus, so I've been trying to do things remotely in the background. So I go into it thinking it can't be that hard to figure out what the active window is when this happens so I can find out which app is doing it and address that. This isn't easy to get going, particularly in a managed language since it requires a DLL that can be injected. The callback gets the HSHELLWINDOWACTIVATED notification.

SetWindowsHookEx (), using the WHSHELL hook gets it done. But they don't have a keyboard or mouse attached. You can monitor focus changes with a hook. All it takes is clicking on the data window again, or alt-tab back to it and they're fine. The data is still displayed, but they can no longer switch screens using the keypad because it doesn't have focus anymore. The app displaying that data sometimes loses focus to a non-visible window.

#Something stealing focus windows process monitor software

They have a USB keypad attached to them and the software switches what data is being displayed depending on which button they push. Or if they go and makeĬoffee while the process is loading, and don't change process focus, the newly launched app will get focus.I have some systems that display data. If they launch a process that takes a while to load, the user will have time to change process focus and the new process's window will load in the background without stealing focus. New window gets focus because it's process has focus. If the user launches a process which pops its window up quickly, they won't have clicked on anything else yet and the So, developers of processes which launch other processes can handleįocus switching if they don't like the default behaviour.

An app can programmatically yield to another if it wants (I imagine this is already possible).

No other process should ever get focus until the user grants it.

clicks a shortcut, uses the run command etc. When a user launches an app/process in a normal way, e.g.

If a process gives one of its windows focus, the window gets the focus within that process, but that doesn't affect which process/app has focus.

This would be just like how each control within a window hasįocus, but as window focus takes precedence over control focus, so process focus should have higher precedence still.

Separate the idea of which process has focus and which window has focus, these are different things.

I was wondering if this approach might work or if not why not. It has now been closed but no real solution was offered, just excuses as to why it would be too hard/impossible. I read the previous thread entitled 'Windows 10 : Stop any application from stealing focus ever. If and when you press the key combo, it switches to the window. We show something like a toaster message saying 'Foobar installer wants focus, press Win-Whatever to switch to it'. Option to “Prevent focus stealing” but perhaps that was some “PRO PowerUltraMegaConfig” type of thing I installed as teenagers do. How my ideal solution to this problem would work: Every time a window tries to steal focus, we intercept that, and don't let it. This is not the first thread to point that out, so I won't go on and on. Focus stealing is incredibly annoying at times.