9500M GS Acer Aspire 8920/6920 games minimizing on start

I have a curious issue that has begun to pop up, I believe after I installed a few drivers from laptopvideo2go. Long story short I tried to reset back to the old Acer drivers and I spent a few hours trying to get my video to turn back on.

But here's the actual problem - some games will randomly minimize on startup and then not allow me to switch to them.

I first noticed this with Frets on Fire, where I would boot it up, it would look like it would work and then stay minimized for a while. Click on it in the taskbar and it would either pretend to go to the game or just sit there, moving my mouse to the top left corner. Alt-Tab, similar, sometimes works sometimes doesn't. If I do Switch To in task manager, it works a bit more often but sometimes takes a few times.

I've now noticed this with COD4, Fallout 3, and Trackmania Nations. Fallout 3 causes the game to crash. I've tried stopping as many open programs/processes as possible and it sometimes fixes it, sometimes doesn't.

If it isn't clear, I have an Acer Aspire 8920G with a 9500M GS. I'm currently using the relatively stock 7.15.1(1.7561) drivers.

Has anyone seen this or experienced this or have a good suggestion for good driver versions that don't have problems?

 

Hmm normally this happens when some program starts right after you launched the game. For example I use Comodo firewall with HIPS which used to minimize my games popping up a window to ask me if I want to permit the file.exe to access file.dll etc.
What Firewall/Antivirus/Spyware&Malware software you have? Any Registry protection software? What OS?

 

Well I don't really have anything active that would affect stuff. McAfee Virusscan is usually disabled for me. But I did renable Windows Firewall a few days ago, so that might do it. Also Windows Defender. Running Windows Vista.

 

You sure you disable the same apps all the times? Maybe sometimes you kill the right processes and sometimes you don't....

You have SP1 installed?