why does focus always revert to the desktop?
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I tried asking about this annoyance on some more user-oriented forums but did not get any good responses, so maybe you software developers can field it. (I am an retired VAX/VMS programmer BTW.) I want to know why, in Windows 7, when an application exits, application focus always reverts to the desktop instead of the most recently visited and still open app? I am a recent convert from Windows 2000, which didn't have this problem. When did this focus policy change? XP? Vista? In Windows 7, an app can dominate the screen --completely maximized, and yet the desktop has the focus. How is this EVER useful? It is blatantly counter-intuitive. The only time I want the desktop to have focus is when all apps are minimized or there are no apps running. Is there a way to tweak this behavior (with something like the old TweakUI) to the way I want, or do I have to do it the hard way and write an event monitoring utility? Or maybe some third party has already adressed this?
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I tried asking about this annoyance on some more user-oriented forums but did not get any good responses, so maybe you software developers can field it. (I am an retired VAX/VMS programmer BTW.) I want to know why, in Windows 7, when an application exits, application focus always reverts to the desktop instead of the most recently visited and still open app? I am a recent convert from Windows 2000, which didn't have this problem. When did this focus policy change? XP? Vista? In Windows 7, an app can dominate the screen --completely maximized, and yet the desktop has the focus. How is this EVER useful? It is blatantly counter-intuitive. The only time I want the desktop to have focus is when all apps are minimized or there are no apps running. Is there a way to tweak this behavior (with something like the old TweakUI) to the way I want, or do I have to do it the hard way and write an event monitoring utility? Or maybe some third party has already adressed this?
After some more investigation I've found that only legacy apps make the desktop behave this way. For instance if I try this with AutoCAD 2000 or EMACS, both of which I use all the time, my complaint stands. If I try it with say, Notepad and a command prompt they behave OK. So what is at the bottom of this?