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Recently, when I click on a running program in the taskbar, it is anyones guess if it will come to the front. Google chrome behind Blizzard desktop launcher, neither clicking on the program in the taskbar nor clicking on the parts of the window visible to the side of the launcher bring it to the top. Malwarebytes window open, world of warcraft on top of it, click it and it won't come to the front for several clicks. Once it is on front, now clicking on wow wont bring wow to the front. GOM media player, 3 windows open, click torrent client, comes to the front on top of 2 out of three of the gom windows. Windows explorer windows open browsing files, bring chrome to the front on top of it, clicking explorer in the taskbar will not bring it to the front. It seems to be totally random. I ran malwarebytes and got rid of some adware, and for a minute it seemed like that had fixed it. An hour later and it is happening again. Spotify on top of file folder window, clicking explorer does not come to the front.
Any help?
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I had same problem under windows 10 x64
Tried scf/scannow but no results, the below link solved the problem(although SCF showed corrupted files)
1. Go to start and type regedit.exe.
2. Navigate to the following location: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.
3. Double click the 'ForegroundLockTimeout' key. Change the notation to decimal.
4. The default value should be 200000 millisecond in decimal, or 200 seconds. Click OK.
5. Restart your computer and check if the issue persists.
It's not just Firefox. Edge has the same issue. Firefox seems to be worst for me. After reboot, I have Edge opened, then Windows Calculator. If I click on Edge, it won't come to the top unless I click on the top bar of Edge. Rebooting in Safe Mode doesn't have this problem. I noticed that after normal reboot, it works fine for about 20 seconds. So something is triggered 20 seconds after reboot and causes this problem. Other non-browser apps seem to work fine.
My issue went away in August but now it came back 2 weeks ago. It was right after a Real player update and Norton renewal. I don't know if they have anything to do with it. If any, I suspect is Real player.
I also suspect RealPlayer. That is the only app that seems to effect the browser. RealPlayerforced me to upgrade and I gave in. RealPlayer has a dropdown icon at the very top of the browser that detects any video playing. By clicking on it it downloads it. However, a ghost of that icon still stays on the screen when I move the window or minimize it. So perhaps that locks the order of the window. The same things happened with teamviewer icon, which leaves a ghost behind, but I have not experience locking with that. I suspect when you visit a page with any videos on it and hover over the icon, since you cannot help it, it activates that problem.
This was helpful to me since it pointed me to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop key\ForegroundLockTimeout. However, on my computer it was already on 200000. Thus I tried value 0 and now windows come to foreground when clicked.
However, this could be misleading as if you change anything and reboot the problem goes away but comes back. I tried everything, but the problem still persists.
