Strange focus stealing with only one program

Last issue with my new P753DM-GS.

One of the main reasons I bought this powerhouse is to use it for my work. I am an engineer and will use this machine to run a CFD package called ANSYS. I have been running ANSYS on it since I got it Friday to put it through the paces and see how well it performs. So far, I have been pleased with the performance compared to my ThinkPad.

However, there is this thing the new laptop does that neither my Thinkpad, nor my Dell Precision tower do. All of these machines are running Windows 7 Pro, so this is not an OS issue. It must be something to do with the configuration or who knows.

When ANSYS is running, it won't let the mouse off the ANSYS window. If I move the mouse off that window it immediately jumps back on to the ANSYS window in a random location. If I minimize the ANSYS window, so that I can go online or whatever, the arrow goes to the upper left hand corner of the screen and won't move away. Well, that is not quite right. It does let me move it while ANSYS is performing calculations in the background (setting up the huge matrices and solving them) but when it prints the residuals to the window (even if it is minimized!) the mouse jumps back to the upper left corner.


Any clues or ideas of what to try? Many peers run ANSYS on their windows 7 machine and do not have this issue. I would like to be able to do other work when running my program, but with the mouse jumping up into the corner every .75 seconds, it is kinda hard.

Thanks!

 

This sounds like the ANSYS program may be inadvertently rendering as a 3D window. The behaviour is strikingly similar to windowed games which have a "constrain mouse pointer" option which causes all kinds of weird stuff like that.

Notably, it can create situations where if you alt-tab your application/game may still receive mouse inputs in the background. As soon as you click something, a click may get registered in the app, bringing it back into focus. Then to top it off, since your mouse pointer is at invalid coordinates (as far as the app is concerned) it'll snap it back to somewhere logical, often 0,0,0 (ie top left corner).

With that in mind, I would try disabling G-Sync for the app (add profile) or entirely. G-Sync (when windowed is selected) modifies how the Windows DWM handles things in order to ensure 3D windows are rendered correctly. The 3D window detection can be a bit crude and ANSYS may be getting defected as a 3D window and therefore subject to G-Sync behaviour.

Furthermore, see if there's other render modes for the app. I don't know if it's 3D at all or if it renders with OpenGL or DirectX. You may have options in those regards which play nicer with the window manager and Nvidia drivers.

 

Thanks for those suggestions, Stooj. Do you think it would make a difference if I switched to non-aero theme, like windows basic? I usually do that anyway just to make sure there is nothing robbing my software of even an extra bit of performance. I just have not done it yet on this new laptop.


UPDATE:

I stopped ANSYS long enough to change the theme to windows basic just to try it out. This fixed the problem. Unfortunately, it also seemed to turn off the 150% zoom I had the display set to before. I will try the other suggestions too later. The best would be to have the focus stealing stop and still have the zoom because this 4k monitor is beautiful but those icons are way to small for comfort without the zoom.

Thanks for the suggestion about graphics, Stooj. Perhaps the new information will spark another suggestion as well.