My active window keeps changing...

[amwebby]

... as I'm typing, casing my typing to miss huge chunks of text or the text to be entered in a new window. It's very annoying. Does anyone have any idea what is causing this?

 

[whitenemesis]

another application taking focus. Try running task manager and seeing what's running in the background?

 

[amwebby]

Thanks. I did that after posting this (great minds think and post alike!) and noticed wmpnetwk.exe kept popping up. I've disabled Media Player Network sharing (I never enabled it so an update must have kindly done that for me.) so let's see if that solves the problem.

Thanks again

Edit: it happened again while typing this post! Grrr

 

[pos.k]

Do you have any malware checkers active such as spybot or adaware.
There could be a dodgy application on your machine.
Suggest re-boot, full scan for viruses, spyware, adware, keyloggers etc. if no luck then possibly system restore to before this started happening?

good luck.

 

[whitenemesis]

Make sure you click and doudle click on the CPU heading in the Processes tab. This brings to the top of the listing the active processes. Surprising what pops up, even just briefly!

 

[amwebby]

Whitey, that's what I did.

pos.k, I have Windows Live OneCare, which is supposed to check for malware but I'll run Adaware just to make sure.

 

[whitenemesis]

When your window looses focus try alt-tab and see if it's an invisible pop-up?

 

[amwebby]

Adaware found a Win32BackDoorRbot Trojan. That seems to have fixed the problem. Thanks guys.

 

[amwebby]

It's still doing it...

 

[whitenemesis]

It's still doing it...

Have you tried the alt-tab bit?

 

[amwebby]

Yep, nada

 

[whitenemesis]

Spoke with my IT support guy..

"Switch it off completely and then back on, not just a restart"

Usual highly paid advice!

 

[amwebby]

Thnaks but I had tried all that. I finally found it with your Alt-tab trick but I had to be fast.

I recently changed to O2 Broadband and the installation routine installed a "helper" called O2 Broadband Assistant. It was this that was popping up periodically to check my system health and pushing the active application to the back. It was only doing it for a second, hence the alt-tab trick had failed to catc it before. Sneaky little bugger. Needless to say it ha been nuked.

 

[MikeL]

......called O2 Broadband Assistant.......

Please save us from applications called "helper" or "assistant"......

Mike

 

[Nibbo]

Use a more intensive malware checker like MALWareBytes or SUPERAntiSpyWare.
They are free to use and will find things that most others miss.
Live OneCare did not seem to catch anything when I used it.