WinXP: window focus messed up

Question

Something happened as a side-effect of getting more RAM installed in my PC.

My window focus is messed up.

Old, correct behavior:

• when I clicked on one of the taskbar entries, it would bring the desired window to the foreground
• when I clicked on a clicklaunch toolbar button to start a Windows Command Prompt, it would put the focus on that window, and I could start typing right away

New, incorrect behavior:

• when I click on a taskbar entry, it doesn't bring that window to the foreground; instead the taskbar entry flashes a few times. I have to click several times on the taskbar, or I have to use Alt-Tab.
• when I click on the cliicklaunch toolbar button to start a Windows Command Prompt, it doesn't put the focus on that window

What has happened and how do I fix it? please help! This is driving me nuts.

Answer 1

Per Stijn's comment:

Are you sure you only added RAM? I've seen this behaviour before, but only because some (unwanted) hidden application was hogging the focus. Check what is run on startup. (see support.microsoft.com/kb/179365 ) – Stijn Sanders

I used sysinternals autoruns and found two startup programs that I thought I had disabled that were re-enabled (one was sigmatel audio), then restarted Windows. My computer no longer has this problem... not sure exactly what caused it but it's gone.