24 replies to this topic

[TELEFORCE]

Sometimes MWO minimizes on its own. I'm not sure why. It minimizes to desktop, and half the time it happens during battle, at the worst times of course (lost my Summoner early in a game because of this ).

Something like this happens with other programs I'm using as well, except they don't minimize. When I use MS Word, play MegaMek or World of Tanks, the window randomly becomes inactive. It happens intermittently. I haven't found a pattern to it or anything with key presses.

What could be causing this?

I'm running Windows 7 Home 64-bit, MWO 64-bit client. This also happened with the 32-bit client.

[Ratrock]

You have tried running the repair tool right?
could also be that you have one program in the background that is causing the problem so try without any background programs at all then gradually increase the background programs until you get minimized, then you will know for sure which program it is

[TWIAFU]

TELEFORCE, on 17 July 2015 - 01:48 AM, said:

Sometimes MWO minimizes on its own. I'm not sure why. It minimizes to desktop, and half the time it happens during battle, at the worst times of course (lost my Summoner early in a game because of this ).

Something like this happens with other programs I'm using as well, except they don't minimize. When I use MS Word, play MegaMek or World of Tanks, the window randomly becomes inactive. It happens intermittently. I haven't found a pattern to it or anything with key presses.

What could be causing this?

I'm running Windows 7 Home 64-bit, MWO 64-bit client. This also happened with the 32-bit client.

Last time I had windows go unresponsive and randomly minimize, I was infected with something.

Anti-virus deep scan, Unhackme, or something to that effect.

[SnagaDance]

I'm assuming it's another program in the background as well. To illustrate my point MWO is a program that actually does this.

With sometimes long wait times until you get a match I spend my time surfing, maybe I'm posting here on the forums, typing a response, when all of a sudden my keyboard input is no longer registered. The window has gone inactive.

This means MWO has found itself a match. Alt-tabbing at this time will show me which map I'm dropping on.

Going back to typing I will have this happening to me again when the actual battle starts (Betty's start-up litany. Nothing else but those two moments will trigger this for me, not the end of match screen or getting back into the hanger, only game/map connection and game start.

I don't know how it does this, but clearly my active window becomes inactive, without another window really becoming active (MWO didn't just pop into the foreground for instance, and with only MWO and my browser open an Alt-Tab does take me to MWO instead of away from it).

It's weird but in my case a good thing for me as it's a great reminder.

Try to find the program that is causing similar behaviour with your rig.

[Feje]

I know exactly what you are talking about and have a basic idea of the issue at least on my end.

If I have any other window open (Chrome, Teamspeak, ANYTHING) and as I fight if I track with my mouse to the top left of the screen it minimizes. It gets to a point where I wont play with my Unit cause I don't want a second window open that causes my score to plummet....

I have Win8 (Yea that's one problem, I know) so I assumed it was just a weird bug with that. Sounds like it's just a MWO issue.

I did run the repair a couple weeks back and it did nothing but reset my settings.

[Thorqemada]

Very rarely i have that too, maybe every 250 matches 1 time - i dont know what it is...

[xWiredx]

Almost assuredly something in the background taking attention away from other programs sitting at the front. Could be an infection, could be a really aggressive random POS program that is just constantly doing random things. I would lean more toward the infection possibility, though.

[TWIAFU]

HarryTipper, on 17 July 2015 - 03:32 AM, said:

I know exactly what you are talking about and have a basic idea of the issue at least on my end.

If I have any other window open (Chrome, Teamspeak, ANYTHING) and as I fight if I track with my mouse to the top left of the screen it minimizes. It gets to a point where I wont play with my Unit cause I don't want a second window open that causes my score to plummet....

I have Win8 (Yea that's one problem, I know) so I assumed it was just a weird bug with that. Sounds like it's just a MWO issue.

I did run the repair a couple weeks back and it did nothing but reset my settings.

Can you make this happen when your not running MWO?

Another game maybe with TS or Chrome open in background see if things minimize in the same way.

Could eliminate if MWO specific or more of a Win8 possibility. Be the first things I would have tried.

[LaneHacker]

There could be a couple of causes for this. First possible solution is disable your screensaver, for whatever reason it might be trying to kick on and that makes the game minus out. Other solution is to turn off or disable anything that has pop up info, for example steam or origin, or maybe some Anti Virus may do it as well.

These are from my personal issues that I have had. Hope they help.

[Flying Fox 333]

A program called appropriately enough Focus can tell you the process which has the current focus: http://www.happydroid.com/focus

Just run it in the background and wait for the problem to occur then quickly switch over to it to see which process took the focus. The one your after will be the second last in the list, above the focus.exe one.

Let me know how you go. Will be interested to know what the culprit was. If it points to a Windows process, I will let you know what you need to do next to further track down the problem. Otherwise, repair or update the associated program of the process, or disable or uninstall it.

Edited by Flying Fox 333, 17 July 2015 - 06:15 AM.

[RedDragon]

TELEFORCE, on 17 July 2015 - 01:48 AM, said:

Why does MWO keep minimizing?

Because it's a minimally viable product!

Sorry, couldn't resist ^^

[Thorqemada]

I would guess for now its an automatic update of some software like Antivirus, Quícktime, Steam, maybe even Windows Update.

[TELEFORCE]

So I was finally able to play with focus.exe on. I found a couple things that happened when MWO minimized itself. One is Akamai, which is an update application used by Autodesk programs. Another one is a Lexmark Printer update application. And one more is the Sticky Note application, for the Windows 7 desktop sticky notes. I'm not sure why the sticky notes would be doing anything.

I found these in focus.exe while my computer was sitting idle with MWO open. I haven't tried disabling these yet as I haven't had this happen to me yet in-game while focus.exe was running. I'll see if I can find anything else.

[Flying Fox 333]

Thanks for the feedback. I guess try updating the first two applications. I don't use Sticky Notes, but will test this as well myself. Another thing you can try doing is running the game in Full Window instead of Fullscreen.

[Gremlich Johns]

try malwarebytes (it's free). But, there are some programs that will minimize other windows when it wants attention. check what applications you have running resident. (task manager, processes and applications tabs). Also, uninstall crap you know you don't need.

Edited by Gremlich Johns, 26 July 2015 - 07:09 AM.

[TELEFORCE]

I've run Malwarebytes several times and the problem still persisted. I'm going to try disabling some of these services to see if that helps anything. I'll do this before running MWO in windowed mode.

[WANTED]

It's Autodesk. I have that as well happen. It's always been the auto update of the Autodesk. Kill it in the task bar and then try it. Also do you run dual monitors? I do as well.

[KHAN ATTAKHAN]

Not saying you do have illegal software but I found some people who complained of this had a cracked copy of windows on their system and it got detected by windows updates, this creates all sort of funny goings on, the only fix for them was to buy a legitimate copy of windows and stop downloading illegal software, as I said i'm not saying you do have illegal software but it is the most common problem my customers have.

[Flying Fox 333]

WANTED, on 26 July 2015 - 05:17 PM, said:

It's Autodesk. I have that as well happen. It's always been the auto update of the Autodesk. Kill it in the task bar and then try it. Also do you run dual monitors? I do as well.

You should try Wanted's suggestion first.

If you want to disable the Autodesk update, do the following:
If it works, you can then run msconfig, click Startup tab and deselect the checkbox next to the relevant Autodesk update program.

P.S. Sticky Notes didn't seem to minimise anything for me.

Edited by Flying Fox 333, 26 July 2015 - 06:22 PM.

[Rhaythe]

If you alt-tab a lot prior to the match beginning, it's likely a wandering mouse cursor leaving the constraints of the window. Hit escape as every match starts. That seems to fix it for me. Must reset the mouse bounds in the window.