Mouse Hover Makes Window Active - Enable

Thanks for the help, Dixon, but it's not right yet.
I ran XMouseSetting, unchecking Auto Raise (and logged off and back in), but the behavior is the same. Here is a simple example: I have open an Excel window and an Explorer window, slightly overlapping. If I hover the mouse over either, I can scroll with the mouse wheel or type, and the input is received correctly in whichever window has the mouse over it. But while clicking in the Explorer window always brings it to the front, clicking in the Excel window never does. I found the only way to bring it to the front is to click its title bar. (This actually always happens with Excel. Its window never comes to the front when I click inside it.) What I need is a setting that allows that click to override any other stacking or ordering being done, so that a clicked window always comes to the front.
I didn't run WizMouse, as it seems irrelevant to my issue. Thanks for your continued help.

-Imp

I FOUND A SOLUTION!

I can bring the window to the front if I click in it BEFORE the mouse hover activates. Example: If I have notepad and Excel open, overlapping, I can hover over either and scroll within it. If I click in notepad, it moves to the front, but clicking in Excel never does. However, if I move the mouse over Excel and click in it before the mouse hover activates it, it will come to the front. So the hover delay continues to be an important setting.

Thanks, everyone, for this discussion. Windows 7 continues to impress me with its useful features.

250 ms. Allows enough time to get to the systray icons, but not too long a wait when I'm actively scrolling between several windows. And so far, it's enough time for me to click in the Excel window when I want to bring it to the front. if I miss, I just head to the title bar or hover back to another window first.

dave1812 said:

The issue I'm having is that when in Explorer, I can't use the scroll wheel when moving from the folder pane to the file pane without FIRST clicking somewhere in the file pane. Years ago I had a mouse driver that allows that and haven't seen that functionality for quite a while now. If anyone knows how to get the scroll wheel to work by placing the cursor within the pane (without having to click inside of that pane), please share how it's done. I miss that functionality!

FYI, the functionality I'm looking for in Explorer does work in Thunderbird. Clicking on a folder, I can hover over the emails list pane and begin scrolling that window with the wheel without having to click somewhere within it first.

Any answers?? This is my problem, too. I hate having to click every time I switch back and forth in the explorer window, one obvious reason is it changes what is in the right window depending on what you click to get the focus into the left window for scrolling, unless you painstakingly choose your spot (time waster!). This wasn't a problem in XP, why did MS change this functionality??

It still works in Outlook, but not explorer. Will the wonders never cease?

Background:

About 6 months ago I moved from my long (and generally happy) relationship with XP to Win7 (so that I could run on newer hardware!) I customize my machine quite a lot, and hover mouse (Xmouse) is a top priority. It allows me to type in a "lower" window while reading from a "higher" window and even copy&paste from "higher" to "lower"... besides, I grew up in unix (before linux even), so when my company pushed me to XP, it was Tweak UI that made the transition tolerable. (That plus 'gvim'!=)

The .reg files I have picked up here are great, and by the time I began customizing Win7, even the confusion about 'ActiveWndTrkTimeout' had settled out, however I have recently begun to notice a minor annoyance and am hoping for some direction here on SevenForums. Perhaps something has changed on my PC (a system update?) or perhaps I just didn't notice it all that time???

I have become quite comfortable with Win7 now, and I generally prefer it to XP at last. I hate to try anything too "radical" that will mess with my existing, significant range of customizations and its current stability, but this recent annoyance (see below) has me looking around for answers now.

My subtle question:

My subtle annoyance is with the hover behavior for Internet Explorer. To get an IE window (either "lower" or even the one "on top"), to be active, say for scrolling, I have to hover over the "frame" of the window first, not just anywhere in the IE window's interior. And since my focus for hovering is virtually always in the "content" area, not the toolbar, this is an annoying inefficiency...

I have seen some comments in this thread regarding the timeout setting. I went with 150ms, and with this one exception of IE, everything is dandy, but now that this behavior has become annoying, I am wondering if changing the timeout length would help. Frankly, I doubt it since I can hover in the "interior" of IE indefinitely and get no activation until I move the mouse over the toolbar or the outer frame of the window.

Any help/suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

Does anyone know of some registry key or anything that can make it so that there is a delay before the focus is swapped? maybe about 1 to 2 seconds? Because I only stumbled across this article trying to find how to do that...