Active window becomes inactive

[Guest]

Whenever I am online, my active window becomes inactive about every two
minutes. This even happens to Word, Excel, IE, etc. Whatever window is
active, keeps becoming inactive. This does NOT happen unless I am online. I
recently downloaded SP2, my IE version is
6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519. This is very frustrating and annoying
to have to keep clicking on the window to make it active again. What is
causing this and how can it be corrected?

 

[Jon Kennedy]

Do you have Outlook Express running - and checking for new emails every two
minutes? If so, then Minimize the OE window to the taskbar - don't have it
open behind your other windows. Same could go for an open IE window that's
on a page that's coded to refresh ever two minutes or so - like a news or
stock site, for instance.

 

[Guest]

I do not use OE, never have. If I happen to have more than one window open,
one is always minimized to the taskbar. HOWEVER, even if I have just one IE
window open, it continually becomes inactive every two minutes or so. I can't
tell you how frustrating this is becoming. Even if I am typing something in
the active window, it becomes inactive on me and I have to click on it.

 

[Jon Kennedy]

This may be caused by spyware/malware that's gotten installed on
your system. Use Ad-Aware, MSAS and/or Spybot Search & Destroy to remove
it.

Microsoft Anti-Spyware (beta)
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
Ad-Aware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
Spybot: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
Good sites on how to install and use Spybot -
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/tutorial/index.html
http://tomcoyote.com/SPYBOT/index1.php

Also download a winsock repair tool, to have just in case cleaning up
anything found breaks it -

Winsock repair tools:
LSPFix- all versions of Windows http://www.cexx.org/lspfix.zip
Winsock2 Fix- Win98, ME
http://www.bu.edu/pcsc/internetaccess/winsock2fix.html
LavaSoft- all versions of Windows-
http://digital-solutions.co.uk/lavasoft/whndnfix.zip

More information here:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/
http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/Darnit.html
http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/ - runs a little script when loading page to
check for common parasites

If no joy, in IE go to Tools...Internet Options...Advanced tab, Browsing
section, uncheck "Enable third-party browser extensions", click Apply, click
Okay, reboot. If that solves your problem, then more troubleshooting is
needed to find out exactly which program, or Browser Helper Object (BHO) is
causing this problem. You don't want to leave it at that, as some BHOs are
useful or necessary - like Adobe Acrobat for reading .pdf files or an
essential component of Norton AV. Get BHODemon -
http://www.definitivesolutions.com/bhodemon.htm - read all about BHOs.
Disable all items, and then gradually replace one or two at a time to narrow
down the culprit.

Or if you have IE 6 SP-2 you can do this within the browser:
How to manage Internet Explorer add-ons in Windows XP Service Pack 2
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;883256

If all the above fails, then the problem could be something new that the
spyware cleaners above don't have in their databases yet. In that case....
HijackThis direct download:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/files/hijackthis.zip
Tutorial on how to use HijackThis:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/htlogtutorial.html
Then post it's output log to the forum here for analysis and feedback by the
parasite experts:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/forums/
Or the other HijackThis Logs forums listed here:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/forums.html

Or try this program to get some of the most nasty malware:
CWShredder direct download:
http://aumha.org/downloads/cwshredder.zip

An alternate resource for all of this and more:
http://www.aumha.org/secure.htm

 

[Ultra]

Whenever I am online, my active window becomes inactive about every two
minutes. This even happens to Word, Excel, IE, etc. Whatever window is
active, keeps becoming inactive. This does NOT happen unless I am online. I
recently downloaded SP2, my IE version is
6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519. This is very frustrating and annoying
to have to keep clicking on the window to make it active again. What is
causing this and how can it be corrected?

I have been having same problem and after watching "processes" in task manager, I noticed that the program "wgrmgr.exe" was cycling on and off in conjunction with the window being active or not. I stopped this service and the problem disappeared... Windows cannot report problems with this setting, but it sure has releaved a headach.

Ultra