Disk Detective: The Case of the Window Snatcher

August 2nd, 2008 | by Mitchell Allen |



Photo by crowt59

Breaking and Entering

Obsession is a robber of time. But, compulsion isn’t the culprit in this criminal caper.

No. This case involved a most elusive thief: a petty pilferer of panes.

You’ll want to lock your windows after reading this.

Dossier

Once, during an instant messaging chat session, I complained to my friend Todd.

“Why does XP keep switching windows when I’m trying to type?”

He told me that he had a registry fix and would send it through the chat program’s file sharing.

I retrieved the hack, made the change and everything was fine.

Months later, the fix stopped working.

Every time I clicked a link in my email, Firefox would steal the focus.
If I was working on a file and another program demanded attention, I would be whisked off to a dialog box.

This annoying behavior, if not felonious, certainly was disturbing the peace.

Tossing the Place

I had to find that file from Todd. Though I tried to remember where it was, my mind was blank.

It was as if I had misplaced my car keys. Everything stopped while I frantically typed keywords into Copernic Desktop Search, my handy-dandy file indexing utility.

I tried windows focus.

Apparently, the file didn’t contain either of those words. Unfortunately, 944 other files did!

After trying various keywords, I gave up on Copernic and turned to Thunderbird.

The email program has a capable search engine and I spent some time hunting through every email I had ever received from Todd, even though I was sure he sent a text file!

When that turned up empty, I snooped around until I found some old chat logs on my external hard drive.
Browsing through those was interesting but I found no mention of registry or window focus problems.

This obsession was getting the better of me.

The focus thief was running rampant.

Something had to be done.

Time to bring out the heat.

Secret Hacker Files

Using a Windows-centric Google search, I typed keep focus on active window.

Half-way down the results page, I spotted an old, trusty informant:

Ask Lifehacker: how do I stop focus thieves?

Sensing that I was onto something, I grabbed my coffee and Pop-Tart ® and waited for the page to load.

Hot Pursuit

I followed the trail from pillar to post (note, this is not what is meant by a “Pillar Post“!)
I chased this slim, but promising lead until I caught up with the informant.
Lifehacker immediately gave up the tapes on the Rent-a-cop who went AWOL in this case:



TweakUI

“Tweaky” was lurking deep in C:\WINDOWS\system32\TweakUI.exe. I apprehended him on the Start Menu and demanded to know why he let the focus thief run loose through the neighborhood.

He clammed up, so I went back to the hacker, figuring I would play the two off on each other.

Turns out, I didn’t have to wait long.

Case Closed

Tweaky confessed to having a simple way to lock my windows. In five minutes, both the obsession and the focus thief were sentenced to oblivion.

Tweaky was put on probation, and required to perform community service.

Lifehacker accepted some linky love in lieu of a fiver.

Next: The Case of the Disappearing Tray Icon.

The old security sign has a history.

Further Reading
  • St. Valentine’s Day Mascara
    Photo by RBerteig Ode to a Cornish Hen Stalking Iris, on my way to St. Ives Alas, alack! Apparently I am smitten, - Hiding plainly, in the road lie seven knives. A trip, a fall, all parts o...
  • Word Association: Web Browsers, Vehicle Cigarette Lighters
    Inside My Creaky Green Van If the word plug-ins came to mind, then you are weird, like me! My week-old copy of Windows Secrets has a freebie for all of us: search tools for Firefox and IE7. ...
  • Butterflies
    Photo by KevinZim Cocoon Logos are living messengers of your business. When a logo gets old and tired, you need to send in a reinforcement. Just as baby New Year nudges Father Time to exit s...
  • The Secret of the Circular Reference
    In philosophy, where I learned about fallacies, circulus in probando was not mentioned. Would that be because it is impossible to define circular reasoning without referring to circles or reasoning? ...
  • Plums in the Deep
    Photo by mrpattersonsir "The next empires will be empires of the mind." - Winston Churchill This is the conclusion of an essay about changing perceptions, which begins with The C...
Stumble It!

  1. 2 Responses to “Disk Detective: The Case of the Window Snatcher”

  2. By Bobby Revell on Aug 8, 2008 | Reply

    That is very strange Mitch! I’ve never had anything like that happen, though I have had many stubborn viruses and spyware. The cure is to use a mac or linux. I have 3 linux computers. One of them has only been rebooted once in 7 years because of a power outage. It has firefox 1.5 on it and runs perfectly. I just updated my windows pc to servicepack 3, which should be renamed “backdoor 3″ because that’s exactly what it is. I am thinking about boycotting all microsoft products.

    I look forward to the disappearing tray icon :smile:

  3. By Mitchell Allen on Aug 8, 2008 | Reply

    I liked Microsoft when they just had DOS.
    Even then, though, they were evil, as Mr. G didn’t even write the code! He exemplifies the 19th century Robber Barons. He controlled nearly every aspect of the OS from manufacture to distribution!

    I love MS applications, I just hate that they try to put a kitchen sink on my desktop.

    Linux sounds like fun, but I have little time to learn a whole new OS. (I’m not one to just boot up and send email, I’m a gadget junkie.)

    You know what we all need for real? A Commodore 64!!!
    Evil virus writers would be out of business tomorrow!
    The C-64 had the entire OS on ROM. What made it cool was that it copied parts of the ROM into RAM, where we could “hook” the system calls and do all sorts of cool things.

    Why the heck can’t somebody write a ROMMable OS?

    Cheers,

    Mitch

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