App Modal Dialogs + Desktop
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I have noticed a behavior recently which I think may be new with Windows 7. If an application is showing a modal dialog, it seems that I cannot use the "Windows Key+D" shortcut to show the desktop. The shortcut still seems to do something, i.e. it changes which app is active, but the system stops short of returning all the way to the desktop. Has anyone else noticed this? Is it new or did I somehow manage to miss this behavior in previous versions of Windows?
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I have noticed a behavior recently which I think may be new with Windows 7. If an application is showing a modal dialog, it seems that I cannot use the "Windows Key+D" shortcut to show the desktop. The shortcut still seems to do something, i.e. it changes which app is active, but the system stops short of returning all the way to the desktop. Has anyone else noticed this? Is it new or did I somehow manage to miss this behavior in previous versions of Windows?
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Do you mean that Win+D always brings you straight to the desktop (and that you are running Windows 7)? It would not surprise me if there is some sort of TweakUI-style option I can adjust to change this behavior...
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1. Yes and Yes. 2. I have no Tweak-UI or similar, this is just a standard Windows 7 system.
I must get a clever new signature for 2011.
That's interesting. As I experiment with different UI actions, I am starting to get the impression that it is not just any app modal dialog that causes the issue; rather, I think the dialog has to be an Office app modal dialog. In fact, the problem may not be the dialog per se, but may tie back to OLE, embedded documents, and such. The infrastructure that those features rely on is pretty antiquated and was developed during a time when all sorts of app-level scenarios were capable to locking up the whole Windows GUI (i.e. the time of "cooperative multitasking".) Relatedly, this may not be a Windows 7 issue so much as it is an issue that arises when doing advanced, cross-product things in Office.