Solved Alt-Tab and Taskbar Previews Disappear

[Brink]

This is not a keyboard issue but a windows registry/setting. I can now hold down alt+tab for about 10 seconds since I made the following change in the registry.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AltTab]
"LivePreview_ms"=dword:0000ea60

Hope this helps others.

Nice trick.

You could also press CTRL+ALT+TAB to have it stay open as long as you like until you click on anything.

 

[Blackhawk131]

Yes that will keep the one screen open but after a while it will still do the same thing. I only wanted to increase the time before the screens disappeared in background.

 

[Brink]

Ah, ok. I was thinking the time for the ALT+Tab window itself and not the actual opened windows in the background.

 

[Evermaak]

Hmm almost 2 years later and I'm experiencing the same problem with an up to date Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on my ACER 5940G laptop. Had to disable Aero Peek to fix it. Too bad, kinda liked the preview Peek provided

Isn't there somebody with a better suggestion by now?

 

[Blackhawk131]

Refer to post #21 above. It shows the registry setting that needs to be modified. Hope this helps without turning off Aero Peek.

 

[tzioneretz]

It's the widgets!

Hmm almost 2 years later and I'm experiencing the same problem with an up to date Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on my ACER 5940G laptop. Had to disable Aero Peek to fix it. Too bad, kinda liked the preview Peek provided

Isn't there somebody with a better suggestion by now?

Pursuant to a suggestion in this thread, I disabled the three widgets I had on my desktop (clock, calendar, and currency converter). The problem disappeared. Then I restored them en bloc, and everything was fine for a few hours, then the problem reappeared. Removed them again, and reenabled them one by one. It's definitely not the clock. I thought the calendar checked out and it was the currency converter, but apparently not. I'm still conducting tests to see which of the two it is.

In any event, in my case it was the desktop widgets. Really happy about that as I can live without them, but the aero peek I simply adore and wouldn't have liked to have had to disable it.

 

[no displayname2]

Windows taskbar popups disappearing

Sorry for resurrecting this rather old thread, but it came up high in the list when I searched for the problem, so it might be a good place to share my solution.


I actually had two problems: the one descibed here that the taskbar popups with the preview window only appear briefly and when playing Neverwinter my character always wanted to sidestep as if the shift key was stuck somehow.


Fortunately someone mentioned that he found the error in his setup by disabling all windows services and re-enabling them step by step. For him it ended up to be his Citrix service but for me it was the hidsys service (all services have a long name in your language, but you can see the actual name of the executable in the properties). It's a service somehow responsible for USB audio devices. Since I only have a headset with a USB soundcard, I inspected my headset and found the casing of my volume control to have opened a bit (maybe I stepped on it by mistake? I'm not sure). When I pressed on it gently it snapped into place and to my delight everything worked again: my headset, the taskbar popups and walking in Neverwinter online.

TL;DR; After disabling all Windows services and re-enabling them step by step, I discovered that the bug went away when I disabled hidsys which is responsible for USB audio devices. So I checked my headset which comes with a USB sound card. Turns out it was broken, after deconnecting it everything was fine.

 

[vivek198]

If nothing else works, revert to windows7basic-theme for display from personalization options or windows classic, although the problem with latter is that the arrow keys dont work when using alt+tab, and exit out of alt+tab, but windows-7-basic theme works fine.

 

[Icingdeath]

hopefully new information

Ok I have a user\client that is having the same issues. The problem mainly being with the aero peek preview on the taskbar icons. They wont stay up on the screen long enough for him to select any of the documents he has open. He doesn't really use alt-tab so this may or may not be a problem as well. However I don't believe this has anything to do with any hardware in the system or connected into the system and here is why. If I login with my domain account to his system the issues do not occur. They only seem to happen when he is logged in so this is why I suspect it is an issue with his profile in windows. So its some setting or software issue. I know that I can always blow away his profile and have windows create a fresh new one and copy his data over to it manually but he would really like to avoid this if possible. All of the suggestions that I see posted here while they may work for some I can't really see how they would apply to this case since as I said everything works properly under another users profile. This issue is specifically tied to this one users profile. I know this doesn't offer any solution to the issue but it might at least offer some new information or perspective that hasn't been touched on and lead to a different solution than is already listed here. I have also tried all of these suggestions plus more I have found elsewhere and nothing is helping.

 

[Bancai]

TL;DR; After disabling all Windows services and re-enabling them step by step, I discovered that the bug went away when I disabled hidsys which is responsible for USB audio devices. So I checked my headset which comes with a USB sound card. Turns out it was broken, after deconnecting it everything was fine.

This, if anyone has a problem with alt tabbing or taskbar thumbnail preview should try this. Mine was ofc the usb for the keyboard.