BigBox focusing issue

[cammelspit]

Hello all you beautiful people! I am having some focusing issues with BB. It started with the 7.9 release or in one of the betas, I can't recall exactly when. What happens is when starting BB, it will never be focused and will require me to click on BB to bring it into focus. I have recorded a very short demo of what it does. This is also an issue every time I quit a game and again, I have to click on BB to bring it back to the foreground. Any ideas?

I am running the creators update but this was happening before the update so it should not be to blame here.

[SentaiBrad]

Oh wow. I'm not exactly sure what would cause that... but I would be willing to bet it's other software? What specifically, I don't know.

[cammelspit]

That's what I would have though but the only things running are my anti-Virus, MSI afterburner and Steam, all of which I have tried disabling. Plus, since this has become an issue, I have installed the creator's update which is just like doing a Windows reset so OS shenanigans are rather unlikely in my estimation. I wonder if there are any other troubleshooting steps I could perform that might be useful here but short of reformatting, I can't think of anything else to do here. Next stream I will try asking Jason if he can think of anything else I can maybe try but if you can think of anything else, I am open to suggestions.

[ckp]

Doing a Windows update is nothing near the same as an actual Windows reset/reinstall. All the same stuff is still going to be there.

You might try killing the extra processes one by one that you see running in task manager until you possibly see the issue stop.

[Phox]

This happens to me as well at times. But alt-tab fixes it for me.

[Lordmonkus]

I was having this issue on my HTPC, the way I worked around it was using Xpadder to set a controller button combo to do a mouse click to bring BigBox into focus. Not exactly an ideal fix but it was a work around though.

[SentaiBrad]

I've never had this issue though, which is why I'm super confused. This is just another one of those bugs that is very difficult because it's not reproducible (at least that we know of yet), so it has to be software or a software combination.

[cammelspit]

@ckp Unfortunately, I have already done that, unfortunately, is a no go there.  Also, it's more like resetting Windows than not. It reinstalls all of the operating system's files and is treated like an upgrade. I do know the difference, which is why I said "short of reformatting, I can't think of anything else to do here". Thanks for the tip nonetheless.

[ckp]

That's a bummer. Apparently you are not the only one experiencing this  =/

[cammelspit]

 

UPDATE: I found the problem! With @ckp mentioning the running apps I realized I didn't start going through the services themselves doing the same thing. At least for me, it turns out to be AVAST, my antivirus. Even though I do have an exception put in there for my LB/BB directory and even tried turning all the shields off, it still causes focus issues. How many of you guys are using AVAST? If I manually shut down the app, the service is still running and it only stops causing the focus issue if I stop that service. Now it is time for others to try and replicate it. Avast is very common so it's sure worth fixing this if it can be fixed.

[ckp]

awesome @cammelspit , you might try excluding all the LB/BB application binary files themselves in AVAST also, rather than just the directories. maybe worth a shot.

edit: make sure you reboot after adding the new exclusions and then see if it still happens.

Edited April 24, 2017 by ckp

[cammelspit]

Just now, ckp said:

awesome @cammelspit , you might try excluding all the LB/BB application binary files themselves in AVAST also, rather than just the directories. maybe worth a shot.

 

I absolutely will and I will report back!

[cammelspit]

UPDATE2: I figured out exactly what is causing it. It is Avast's CyberCapture feature. It had LB, BB, every update and even Nielk1's proxy app all in the CyberCapture list. I turned this feature off entirely and now it works perfectly fine even when AVAST is still running in the background. There is an option to always block, which is on by default and an option to 'let you decide'. I haven't tried the 'let you decide' option but turning it off worked just fine for me.

I guess it is some sort of screen reader thing that also makes a copy of the exe being run and sends it into AVAST so they can manually inspect it. I also suspect this might fix some of my other applications focusing issues that I previously had chalked up to Windows shenanigans. Ah, it's nice to not have to alt-tab or to click on it every single time I want to use BB. I will do a bunch more testing to be 100% positive but it seems to have fixed it!

Thanks to all of you guys who helped, THIS is why I love this community so much. Have fun all and happy gaming!

Edited April 24, 2017 by cammelspit

[ckp]

That's great news and will hopefully help some other users! 

[emko]

is there a way to force the focus of Bigbox? i have my setup where task scheduler runs a batch file that will wait for the network to start and then open a network drive to make it available after that it starts bigbox but problem is bigbox will never launch in focus i have to pull out a mouse to click on it.

[ckp]

@emko, does Bigbox get focus ok if you launch it manually, not from your batch file?

what is the exact command you are using to launch BB in your batch file?

does your batch file launch or do anything else after it launches BB?

[ckp]

try launching BB like this in your batch file, in case you aren't:

start e:\mypathtobigbox\bigbox.exe

 

[emko]

its very confusing 

my batch ends with, start C:\Launchbox\BigBox.exe also tried adding exit after that 

when i run the batch file from file explorer Bigbox loads and right after the launchbox video i see BigBox for a second then the file explorer shows on top of BigBox, so its interesting that VLC can take focus but right after that Bigbox loses it ?

i have this batch file run on start after network connection is available but it will always have BigBox not in focus using task scheduler i have also tried running the batch file from startup as a short cut in that folder it does the same thing all ways not in focus 

@ckp no the last thing is start C:\Launchbox\BigBox.exe you can see the cmd prompt window close just before launchbox starts 

 

only solution i have now is to put a short cut of bigbox.exe in the startup folder,  problem is sometimes the batch file takes longer to run and i end up with BigBox crashing because it can't find the folders since stupid Windows tries to connect to network drive before the network drivers are up and ends up being marked as unavailable, though BigBox should bring up the drive if it tries to access it but some reason it just can't.

Thanks

Edited May 3, 2017 by emko

[SentaiBrad]

There is software out there that can handle shell or auto-starting of specific software for this reason, you might want to try looking at one of them. The only thing that is tricky is needing your network drive. You might think about moving LaunchBox locally and only keeping your games over the network, but that's a different set of problems to deal with I guess. In terms of the focus, I would be most willing to bet it's other software or because you're at start up. That's why a lot of people use it as a shell replacement, and stop a lot of different things from popping up. If it's a dedicated PC, I would disable as many non-critical pieces of software and services, which includes Explorer.

[emko]

Just now, SentaiBrad said:

There is software out there that can handle shell or auto-starting of specific software for this reason, you might want to try looking at one of them. The only thing that is tricky is needing your network drive. You might think about moving LaunchBox locally and only keeping your games over the network, but that's a different set of problems to deal with I guess. In terms of the focus, I would be most willing to bet it's other software or because you're at start up. That's why a lot of people use it as a shell replacement, and stop a lot of different things from popping up. If it's a dedicated PC, I would disable as many non-critical pieces of software and services, which includes Explorer.

my setup is like that, but also videos on the network so what happens is stupid windows tries connecting to a network drive before network is up and can't so it marks it unavailable then BigBox starts and can't find the video  so it crashes, no software is doing it as it works fine using startup but only has problems when run with batch or directly opening  program bigbox.exe using Task Scheduler.  What did work was getting task scheduler to open Kodi and that's in focus so with that i can now launch bigbox, what makes no sense is why does the VLC player that plays the launch videos for bigbox stay in focus but not BigBox its self? yea its dedicated PC i will check that out 

 

Thanks