Games minimize to desktop by themselves

[Rod]

I'm running XP Home on an athlon 2400 with 512 RAM. For
the last few weeks, my games, (Americas Army, Rainbow 6
III, Rise of nations, Age of Mythology, etc.) have been
minimizing to my desktop at random times for no apparent
reason. I use Norton Firewall and Antivirus, and run Ad-
Aware and Spybot reagularly.
Sometimes I also get a "button" on my taskbar labeled
" - Microsoft Internet Explorer". Notice the four
blank spaces preceding the "- MS IE" as if the name of
the webpage is four blak spaces. I cannot restore
this "button" to open the window, all I can do is close
it. I don't know what it is.
I've scanned for viruses, adware, and spyware with no
luck. It started happening to all of the games at around
the same time.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks
Rod

 

[Rich Barry]

Rod, do you have a Screensaver or Wallpaper changer working in the
background?

 

[JustMee]

I do not know that this is your problem, but do you have hotfix 824141
installed by any chance?

There are apparently some problems with this hotfix and various games.

Some people have suggested this to fix the problems related to 824141:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;833509


YMMV...

hth,
JM

 

[roblambden]

*I'm running XP Home on an athlon 2400 with 512 RAM. For
the last few weeks, my games, (Americas Army, Rainbow 6
III, Rise of nations, Age of Mythology, etc.) have been
minimizing to my desktop at random times for no apparent
reason. I use Norton Firewall and Antivirus, and run Ad-
Aware and Spybot reagularly.
Sometimes I also get a "button" on my taskbar labeled
" - Microsoft Internet Explorer". Notice the four
blank spaces preceding the "- MS IE" as if the name of
the webpage is four blak spaces. I cannot restore
this "button" to open the window, all I can do is close
it. I don't know what it is.
I've scanned for viruses, adware, and spyware with no
luck. It started happening to all of the games at around
the same time.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks
Rod *

Hello Rod ,
I was experiencing exactly the same problem and when
checked what services are running on my P.C I noticed a rogue on
called wxoyssdh.exe I cannot find any information about this servic
anywhere on the web but if you go into task manager and kill it th
problem goes away.
It's always worth keeping an eye on what services your P.C is runnin
so that if anything new and suspicous appears you can get rid of it
Hope this helps mate


-
roblambde

 

[Matt R]

I am also have this exact same problem, and it just started happening
yesterday (June 28, 2004). When the game minimizes to the desktop, I
click on it in the task bar, and it restores to full screen for a
split second, minimizes a second time, and when I click it again, it
stays full screen for another 5-10 minutes before minimizing again.
Initially I thought it was only happening with Battlefield 1942 (which
I installed yesterday), but the problem also occured today when I
installed and played the "Soldiers: Heroes of WW2" demo.

My system is an Athlon XP @ 2.0 GHz, 768MB DDR, Radeon 9500 Pro
(Catalyst 4.6), SB Live. My video, sound, and motherboard drivers are
all up-to-date. Other than installing Battlefield 1942 yesterday, I
can't think of any other changes I have made to my system. I run
Norton AntiVirus 2003, and daily run Ad-aware to clean out any
spyware/malware, and there are no unusual processes running in the
background.

Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

Matt

 

[Matt R]

I have since discovered something that is probably the same thing, or
at least related. While reading in my web browser, the window will
lose focus (the title bar will become faded, and if I press the arrow
keys to move the web page up or down, nothing will happen until I
click on the web browser window again to make it active). I
double-checked the processes I have running to see if there was
something there that shouldn't be; I found nothing. So whatever's
causing my games to minimize seems to be taking focus away from active
applications also. It's like a an invisible process is taking focus
away, but I can't find what could be doing this.

 

[Matt R]

Well, I've found a solution that solves the problem of my games
minimizing and focus being stolen. I installed Microsoft's PowerToys
for Windows XP (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx),
which allows you to disable focus-stealing. Haven't had a problem
since. Still don't know what the source of the problem is, though.

 

[Matt R]

I spoke too soon. While Battlefield 1942 no longer has its focused
removed, everything else still does, including other games. And
unfortunately, it looks as though installing TweakUI deleted all of my
previous System Restore points, so I might be facing a format and
re-install of Windows XP. Or perhaps I'll try Linux.

 

[Kanto]

I have this very same, exact problem as well. Any luck in resolving thi
other than using TweakUI (which apparently didn't work)


-
Kant