Question

I have an application written in .NET. The previous version had no problems: you double-click on the icon or run it from a command line and when it starts up, it’s the main window and has focus as you’d expect.

The latest version displays a splash screen before the main window and now the splash screen comes to the foreground ok but the main one does not always end up the main window. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. (When launched from the command line it invariably doesn’t). When the main window does not come to the foreground and get focus, the taskbar icon shows as a steady orange.

I see lots of hits on the net about how MS added a facility to prevent applications stealing focus from others, centered around the ForegroundLockTimeout registry setting and related settings, but the behaviors described above for the different versions happen on the same machine.

I have tried called Activate in the main form when it finally gets created, and also SetForegroundWindow, all to no avail.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Sounds like your main window doesn’t always get the focus back from the splash screen. Have you tried simply calling SetFocus in the main form’s OnLoad handler?MSDN