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Sometimes, when I press Alt+Tab and then release, the window select menu stays up until I chose a window with mouse or press Enter. Just like if I wouldn't let Alt key go (but I do). Anyone has an idea why this could be the case?

  1. My keybord is brand new (3 days old). Also I opened screen keyboard and see when Alt/Ctrl/Shift/Win keys are pressed and when they are not. So I'm sure none of those 4 keys are sticking by any mechanical reason.

  2. The behavior is "localy stable". I.e. it works many times in a row. And then (when I forget about it) it behaves normaly many times in a row.

  3. I doesn't it when switching from specific windows. But those specific windows are different each time. I mean when it starts to "stick" it sticks all the time for some windows A,B,C and doesn't stick for D,E,F; then it stop to stick and starts again in a while and now it sticks for A,E,F and doesn't stick for B,C,D.

  4. It behaves in the same way with left and right Alt.

  5. I use SharpKeys to remap control keys. Caps -> Left Ctrl, Left Alt -> Left Ctrl, Left Ctrl -> Left Win, Left Win->Right Alt.

  6. I have sticky-keys disabled.

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I have discovered that that happended only when a top window is in foreing keyboard layout (I've tried Greek, Russian, German). When I switched layout of the top window to English I could use AltTab normally.

Then I was able to check if this disappears when I turn off SharpKeys (thanks to @JaredT for the hint). And I've found out that the problem was that my Right Alt on my keyboard is actually Alt Gr. So when I used SharpKeys I actually used AltGr+Tab instead of Alt+Tab. Once I've rebinded to use Left Alt instead of Right everything started to work fine.

So I guess AltGr makes Tab to mean something different when you use layout different from English.

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    AltGr is basically Ctrl+Alt on Windows. For example with Polish layout the normal way to type letter 'ą' is to press AltGr+A and everyone types it like that, but Ctrl+Alt+A works too. Congratulations on figuring it out yourself!
    – gronostaj
    Feb 8, 2017 at 12:07
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What you're describing is expected behavior for Ctrl+Alt+Tab.

I use SharpKeys to remap control keys. Caps -> Left Ctrl

After this remapping you have Ctrl directly below Tab. I guess you're accidentally pressing Caps Lock along with Tab.

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Any keyboard input encryption such as Sophos Keyboard Guard in Sophos Home Premium (or Zemana, GuardedID, KeyScrambler or any Anti-keylogger) can cause ALT-TAB delays.

https://support.home.sophos.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021845231-Safe-Online-Banking-Keylogger-protection-feature-compatibility

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In my case (on Win10), simply hitting Capslock once solved this issue. It was off to begin with, so this turned Capslock on. I hit it again to turn it back off with no further issues.

I have no idea what the initial cause was. I verified that in other contexts, the OS didn't act as though Ctrl or Alt was pressed. Sticky keys was off, and I don't have any keys remapped (I have a few AutoHotkey macros, but none use Alt, Tab, or Capslock.).

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I had this same problem today. For me, it turned out that it's an idiotic MS-Win 10 setting under System - Multitasking. Under "Alt + Tab", drop the box "Pressing Alt + Tab shows", and pick "Open windows only". I don't use MS-Edge, and I don't care to, it wasn't open, but somehow this setting was causing Alt-Tab to stick. It seems OK, until tomorrow's UI debacle, anyway :-) Big shout out to MakeUseOf for this hack, in the article "How to Customize the Alt + Tab Switcher in Windows 10".

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