Problem: ETS2 keeps minimizing to desktop

[Pembroke]

When I play ETS2 it suddenly minimizes to desktop, which is pretty annoying as it usually causes me to crash my truck before I am able to switch back to the game full screen. This happens usually 1-2 time per playing session.

Googling around found me some older similar reports but since they are all more than several years old I'm not sure of their relevance, and I couldn't find any clear cause. Just some suggestions as to what might be going on. The suspected culprits were:
- Old graphics driver
- Some other running application wants to force itself the focus
- Screen resolution is not native to the display and triggers some conflict
- Bug in graphics driver
- Bug in ETS2
- GPU or CPU not good enough to run everything

My setup:
- I checked that I have the newest up-to-date graphics driver
- I have Nvidia's GTX1080 and an i9 cpu with 32Gb ram so I should be good as far as resources go, I think
- I am running 2 displays, however, if that can cause some issues. However, I refuse to play this game with the laptop's built-in monitor so the second screen's kind a must...
- The display resolution is set to the laptop's recommended resolution. Don't know about the TV's (my 2nd monitor) resolution but since it's a TV and connected with HDMI does it even matter to the computer? It's just streaming out audiovideo data to it, isn't it?
- I am not consciously running any other applications while playing ETS2. There are, of course, apps that run in the background automatically from Windows processes to Steam to what-have-you.

What should I check or investigate? Can I somehow find out if some other app is forcing ETS2 to minimize and what that other app is? When the game minimizes I don't see anything appearing, not even a message. Something else that I should suspect? Anyone else experiencing anything similar?

Perfect long haul delivery ruined as I crashed to a railing at 85 km/h...

[xFetusx]

make sure you have your power management set to performance , make sure you dont have sleep on or turn monitor off after a short time . make sure you are using the correct gpu not the onboard so turn off the igpu in the bios . and update the drivers for the dedicated gpu

[Pembroke]

Rechecked all those:

Power mode = high performance
Sleep = never
Turn off = never
Display adapter = Nvidia Geforce 1080GTX
GeForce Game Ready Driver = 445.87 Apr 15th 2020 (latest)

Looks ok.

[SAMiV]

Do you have any antivirus software installed?

In case you have AVAST then do the following:

Go to settings/components/performance/game mode
And then turn off the Game mode

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And i found a page where you can download an application called 'focus'.
It should tell you what program grabs the focus of the screen.

http://www.happydroid.com/focus

I haven't tryed that one myself.

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And one more thing... was it ETS2 or ATS, that had a 'bug' once which minimized the game or do i remember wrong...?

[TomTomG9]

I found Discord or Origin to cause a problem like that with few games.

[Pembroke]

Yes, it's ETS2. I don't own ATS. This is the only game where I'm experiencing this, I think. Though, I haven't played that much other games lately since I got ETS2, so could be that, too.

Yes, I'm using antivirus software, McAfee. I tried to turn off the game mode and played about an hour after which it minimized again, so no luck there. Fortunately, this time I was browsing jobs so didn't crash my truck.

Thanks for your time. I might look into that focus app.

[SAMiV]

Your welcome and yes, do try that focus app. It might give a clue what program grabs the focus of the desktop screen.

And i don't know about this McAfee antivirus software. If i were you, i would just uninstall it and see if that fixes the problem.
I'm not running any antivirus software. Last AVS i have used was AVAST and before that i used F-Secure.

But i take some ppl say that it's good to have antivirus software installed, but for now i myself am not running any and haven't had any problems running games in Steam.

But do let us know when you get it fixed (I'm subscribed to this topic, so i get notified).
Hopefully somebody other comes here with a better advice than i have given. :)

Good luck!

[H3L10S]

Nice find with that focus app, i'm using it because the same keeps happening to me recently, it turned out to be windows explorer and i've no idea how to stop it.

[Runeshadow]

I've been fighting this problem since the last Windows update.

Much appreciate all of the above research and legwork!

I'm all driver updated and I have tried all of the above. Power Modes set. Game mode off. No anti-virus software, and no malware detected. I set Focus Assistant to no interruptions.

I'm not sure if I have a problem with Windows Explorer. I haven't been able to get the Focus App to install yet. I do use google chrome, drive, etc. I am not savvy with it.

Since it just started with the last Windows update, I feel like it must be some new feature that has, of course, been installed as a default.

It's weird that ETS2 is my only game where I cannot get back to the desktop by hitting the Windows key. I have to use Cntrl-Alt-Del.

It's happening with all games, but it works differently. In ETS, the game keeps running- and I run off the road and crash by the time I can click on the game icon and get back

[kaki_gamet]

That issue has been fixed long time ago, and on a vanilla profile is not happening again : /

Best option would be to quickly Alt-Tab back to ETS2, but to be sure of what is happening, having a look at your game.log.txt file (found into Documents/ETS2 folder), after the issue happened at least once, may show you a possible cause. If you need help in reading its content then uploadcopy-paste it on pastebin.com and leave here the URL.

[gearteam58]

I have this problem on both ATS and ETS2. Other games doesn't experience this issue. Can't solve, it's so annoying to crash almost every time it happens. But if you need to go to desktop you can't because almost all keys are blocked. Issue appeared after some time of successful gamig. Disabled all what I can but it seems it's not ok for 2 games experience same issue. Both my profiles are very old and I didn'thave an issue on them before.

[Madkine]

If the game is minimising it's because some other program has taken the focus. Look at what else you have running and shut down anything unnecesaary.

[Flodoor]

Recently I had the same problem with ETS2, I was searching for a fix but nothing helped.
Yesterday I went to a task manager, I went to detail, right clicked on eurotrucks2.exe and set priority to Realtime.
It fixed my game! It didn't crash since, but I have to set it to that parameter every time I open the game

[The Pitts]

Just to note that setting any task to Realtime priority is potentially disastrous and just means that no other task can interrupt the game because no other task gets any time slices which means that essential system processes might be blocked too. If something is dumping you out of the game then you need to fix that something rather than change the game's priority to a dangerous value.