I believe there’s an ongoing bug with Avast’s UI being displayed or with popups in Avast AV (or suppression of them either by Avast itself or maybe Windows do-not-disturb type features. I wouldn’t be surprised if Avast’s own DND feature is conflicting with its own popups) This happened first in April 2024, got fixed, but has been regressed recently. First about 3 weeks ago, lasting a week, then fixed, but has returned today again.
Basically it seems like Avast is trying to display its UI or to trigger a side popup, but it is not succeeding in doing so, for whatever reason. This causes a brief focus stealing from Avast for about 100ms which causes the active window to flicker briefly going inactive then active, but no Avast windows are shown.
Visibly it’s impossible to tell what app is doing this or that it’s Avast, however, I ran a script to query the handles, ids, and executables of every active app whenever the focus changes and found that the culprit was:
process=AvastUI.exe
process path=C:\Program Files\Avast Software\Avast\AvastUI.exe
This focus stealing behaviour is extremely irritating, actually breaks for example window capturing, recording and some coding and gaming tasks, and also looks very sus (even though as I said I believe it is simply an Avast popup not working properly or the Avast main window not appearing properly).
I have not changed any of my Windows settings in years and it was working fine recently so I’m not going to spend any time changing anything currently. A few weeks ago I changed the Avast Network Inspector settings (to not notify and not re-scan and not test devices’ passwords) since other people reported in the past that this was the culprit, however, that probably didn’t improve things - I assumed someone fixed the issue at Avast and it went away after a few days.
Mostly posting this for the sake of bug fixing this, but if anyone has experienced this behaviour and managed to fix it via Avast itself I’d appreciate any info!