Active window pops into the background

This has started happening to me intermittently, but with increasing frequency. When I'm working in Word or on the internet, the active window will pop into the background (leaving no windows as the active foreground window) so it will no longer register what I'm typing. I have to click on the window to bring it back into the foreground to keep typing. Once it starts doing this, it'll do it every couple minutes until I reboot.

I'm thinking it might be some sort of Vaio Care bug, as it's not something I've ever run into on other Windows machines, and this is my first Sony. On the other hand, I've never used Mozilla Thunderbird on a machine before, so maybe it could be related to that? Not sure. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

 

I've never heard of that happening. I would boot into safe mode with networking and install malwarebytes to check for malware.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I just switched from Thunderbird to Windows Live Mail, and the same thing just happened again, so that's not the problem. But MSE's virus scan is coming up negative, and I'm generally pretty safe with viruses...I know what I'm doing online pretty well. That's why I thought it was some sort of bug instead of malicious software. Would malwarebytes offer much better scanning than MSE?

 

I'm pretty sure I had this problem with my Vaio SE before. The problem's gone now, so I must have done something, but I can't remember what. If I were in your shoes, I would go ahead and disable Vaio Care and Vaio Gate temporarily to see if that fixes the issue, especially if Malwarebytes doesn't find anything.

 

Sounds perfect. Is there a way to disable Vaio Care and Vaio Gate without uninstalling them entirely?

Edit: I don't have Vaio Gate--my machine was a "Fresh Start" Vaio--but I do have Vaio Care.

 

I had some vague instructions on disabling Vaio Care here. It's a fair amount of work -- I wonder if it would be easier to just disable the services and then rename the Vaio Care executable to something else.

 

Ugh...what a chore. It sounds like it would be easier to uninstall Vaio Care then reinstall it after the experiment is done. I've only had it happen once this week, but if it starts to happen frequently, I'll try that.

 

Found the problem! Vaio Smart Network.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/612169-z2-vaio-smart-network-stealing-focus.html