Seen multiple posts in this area but no solutions. It seems like the system is constantly cycling somehow, so there is never enough time to select from the All Programs list, or for a taskbar right click or even hard to select an app when Alt-Tab is pressed. You can see a slight blink on any open apps which seems to instantly preclude any open menus. It is very hard to select from any drop down or selection menus from any appl. I have tried Scannow, malware scanners, creating new profiles...all to now avail.
Anyone out there know of a solution?
I found a different solution to this problem which worked for me and I don't have a Dell / or a laptop. It's a Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium machine.
I edited the registry with "regedit" and changed the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPererencesMask which is a "REG_BINARY" to the New value of "98 32 03 80 12 00 00 00"
The old value I had which had was "99 32 03 80 12 00 00 00" caused the windows or menu selections on the taskbar to disappear too quickly for me to move the mouse over them to make a selection. All I changed was that 99 to 98 which I looked on an other Windows 7 64-bit machine which did not have this problem.
It works great now!
Some posts tell you to change the key "MenuShowDelay" from 400 to a higher value but that did nothing for me.
Hope this helps someone.
After many hours search and troubleshooting I found that Dropbox is known to steal focus see Solved: Office365 and Dropbox, stealing "focus" - Dropbox Community - 236604 it is said that the Dropbox badge which steals the focus can be turned off How do I turn the Dropbox badge on or off? but I failed to do so. Instead, I disabled it via START msconfig startup untick Dropbox OK and that solved the problem for me. If you have no Dropbox installed and running you might need to troubleshoot using the instructions on https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/929135/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windowsSeen multiple posts in this area but no solutions. It seems like the system is constantly cycling somehow, so there is never enough time to select from the All Programs list, or for a taskbar right click or even hard to select an app when Alt-Tab is pressed. You can see a slight blink on any open apps which seems to instantly preclude any open menus. It is very hard to select from any drop down or selection menus from any appl. I have tried Scannow, malware scanners, creating new profiles...all to now avail.
Anyone out there know of a solution?
I have been dealing with this for weeks and the previous posts were of no help. My system starting responding this way while I was working on a rather large Word document. Disabling Dropbox corrected the problem immediately. My thought is that Dropbox did an update in the background and initiated the problem.Glad I read to the bottom of this thread. Dropbox was causing the problem for me. I have it disabled for now and my drop-downs no longer disappear. Apparently Dropbox is intent on grabbing focus quite often. Rather annoying.
Thanks very much for the post.