hov mouse over title bar makes active window go behind other windows?

Hi,

I have a problem that I just can't seem to solve. It's a lot like the aero preview thing, but the behavior is different. If I move the mouse to anywhere in the title bar of the active window, it goes behind other visible windows. Whatever other windows are there will come to the front. I can bring a window back with the task bar, or by cycling though ALT-TAB, but if the pointer is moved into the title bar, the window goes away again. Here are the results of my troubleshooting:

-aero theme is not in use. So it's not the aero preview thing.

-Control Panel->ease of use->change how your mouse works->Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse is DISabled

I'm not even sure how to troubleshoot this any further.

This just happened today, seemingly randomly. I've had it for about two weeks.
This is a pretty weird thing, and makes it impossible to, for instance, move windows around.

Any ideas would be most appreciated.

That sounds rather weird. Are you running any custom themes or third party software that modifies the appearance/function of windows? What antivirus are you currently running?

FliGi7 said:

That sounds rather weird. Are you running any custom themes or third party software that modifies the appearance/function of windows? What antivirus are you currently running?

I'm using McAfee Enterprise, remotely managed (not by me). This is in an office setting.

I don't have any third party software other than Grep, which is a command line tool, 7Zip, which did add itself to the context menu, but that's about it. Otherwise I have the usual compliment of Office and Adobe products.

I was wondering if a stuck key might be responsible, but this is a new keyboard and I can't think of any key combo that would lead to this behavior.

I see. It sounds like there is obviously something running that is stealing or moving the focus but it's hard to say what could be doing that. Is there any chance you downloaded those tools from third party sites that might have included a little something extra in the install?

FliGi7 said:

I see. It sounds like there is obviously something running that is stealing or moving the focus but it's hard to say what could be doing that. Is there any chance you downloaded those tools from third party sites that might have included a little something extra in the install?

I guess so... seems weird that it would happen all of a sudden. Nothing's been installed recently and I have rebooted a few times since 7Zip was installed.

I guess I will look at my process list and see if something looks out of place.

EDIT: It looks like the Google Toolbar installed itself somehow, but is not showing in any browser. That seems odd. I'll approach this from the point of view of renegade programs influencing the windows. Thanks for your time.

The solution was removing the hidden Google Toolbar, apparently, because once I did that, the problem was solved. Pretty strange!

That seems very weird and uncorrelated, but you can't argue the results if it worked. Thanks for posting the solution you found.