Game losing window focus - becoming unplayable

[Snapdragyn]

Help me, tech support, you're my only hope!

My computer has been shifting window focus on its own for several weeks now. I cannot find anything about this online, & 1 tech friend who looked it over couldn't solve the issue. It's now gotten so bad that gaming has become almost impossible - it can randomly swap out of FFXIV 3-4 times during a single boss fight. It is decidedly worse this past week; sometimes I have to FF because it'll start happening every 10-15 seconds (no joke).

I am horribly tech illiterate (like, I know the 'on' button & very little beyond that). I'm pretty sure I'm running Windows 10. I know my graphics card is NVidia - but can't find where to look up the actual make (they move things around every time they release a new Windows version, grrr - & why do they put it all on my lawn?! ). This happens regardless of what program(s) I have open in the background, & it doesn't even always shift to the same thing anyway - & often doesn't fully shift (though my desperate clicking on the game window to try to get it back could be a factor there).

I'm to the point I'm ready to chuck the thing out the window & buy a new computer, but have no idea if that would even fix anything if it isn't a problem with my system in the first place!

Anyone have any ideas WTH is going on here?

[Rosettias]

If it is a window suddenly taking over for a split second, it might look like a CMD prompt i might be able to help you as i had the same issue. Do you have Microsoft office installed?

If yes do this:

Go to task scheduler (just search in your start bar)

In the left column expand task scheduler library then Microsoft. Select Office

Select everything and right click then select disable.

This will solve your issue.

Hope this helps.

[Snapdragyn]

Sadly, this did not work.

I disabled everything in MS Office task scheduler, played FFXIV... & had the same issue occur. It was the original 'double drop' version & not the 'frequent drop' version, but it's too soon to stay if that was an actual change or just happenstance.

[Aladire]

Are you using a keyboard? Did you assign any hotkeys to anything on your bar or are you only using the default 1 through =?

If you are using custom hotkey settings, please what your hotkeys are set to? Maybe a combination of keystrokes is causing an application to start up. I learned the hard way that in windows 10, ctrl+shift+r does something with the display, yet on windows 7 that hotkey combination did not do anything.