Suddenly, I notice Windows 7 window manager behaves strangely

08
2014-07
  • Wok

    Windows 7 window manager has recently started to behave strangely.

    Firefox and Steam are running simultaneously. I am looking at the window of Firefox.

    Steam

    Now, I click on the Steam icon in the taskbar, the icon starts to blink in blue, and nothing has changed, I am still looking at the window of Firefox.

    enter image description here

    However, if I press alt-tab, I am able to bring the Steam window to the foreground.

    The situation is then the same if I want to bring again the Firefox window to the forground.

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    Firefox window disappears
  • Pops

    At some point in the last half hour, my Firefox window disappeared. I didn't notice, as I was working in another program at the time. No Firefox icon shows up with Alt-Tab, and no Firefox listing shows up under the Applications tab in the Task Manager. There is a Firefox entry under the Processes tab. Normally, I probably wouldn't have noticed, and would just open Firefox up again, but I'm listening to an Internet radio station and the stream never stopped.

    When I did open a new Firefox window, it showed up in the Task Manager's applications tab. I'm running Windows XP, and my Firefox has the add-ons Adblock Plus, BetterPrivacy, Cert Viewer Plus, DOM Inspector, Firebug, Greasemonkey, Java Quick Starter, Live HTTP headers, Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant, NoScript, WebDeveloper and XPather. The radio station is Slacker; it's never given me any trouble before, and I've been using it for months. I don't think there was anything unusual in my open tabs; just a few static pages at non-sketchy sites like Java APIs, plus GMail and the aforementioned Slacker.

    Searching Google brought up a handful of similar-but-not-quite-the-same errors, none of which had useful resolutions. Does anyone know how to bring that window back and/or prevent this from happening again?


    • Related Answers
  • John T

    Firefox randomly disappearing or crashing is usually add-on related. Try updating to the latest version of Firefox, then disable all add-ons and selectively re-enable them until you find the culprit. Try reproducing the problem in the same way with the radio stream.

  • Eric

    I've noticed this, too. Once when I tried searching for a solution, I came across this thread from Mozilla's support forum.

    Looks like it's been around for a while (note one of the more recent comments indicating that it still happens in 3.5.x).

  • Ganesh R.

    Did your windows explorer crash??? If it did, sometimes, the taskbar icons will disappear but the process will still be running in the background. The information you gave points out that the application disappeared from the explorer BUT was running in the background.

  • Pops

    I figured out how to reproduce the error. For some reason, opening up the widget that controls my graphics card makes Firefox go poof. Other programs are not affected. The card is an nVidia Quadro. I'll add to this post if I discover any other details, but I think the answer now is just to not muck around with the display settings while Firefox is running.

  • Bobby

    I've had similar problems by using tools like VirtuaWin, they're hiding the windows and some times they just disappear. For VirtuaWin exists an AddOn, Window List, which lists every window and can restore it to the actual Desktop.

    If you don't use such a tool, then sorry for wasting your time.