For the past 4 or 5 days, the Nexus dock I use exclusively as the only task bar has suddenly began not bringing task application windows to the foreground, until I press a key after clicking on the task icon.

It doesn't do it every time, but basically the following happens:
- when I mouseover the nexus screen edge, it pops up and shows all the tasks just fine (it doesn't miss any or have any problems at all that way)
- when I mouseover the task entries, the zoom/unzoom works fine
- when I then click a task entry in the dock, no sound is made, but the currently active application loses focus.
- if I then press any key - just on its own - the correct application window is suddenly now made visible, and gets sent the character. So if it's Open Office Writer that's behind other apps, and I click on the icon in the task dock, the window isn't made visible, but if I type a character ('a' for example) the application window suddenly appears, and that character now appears in whatever control had the focus in that application.

This happens more often with full-screen applications, but it happens to 64- and 32-bit applications, dialog boxes, applications on either the primary or secondary display. It also happens to windows with no maximise/minimise function (dialog-type modeless form applications), and it happens to windows that are minimised.

It seems to happen much more often when the system has a moderate CPU load - anything over 8% means I'm very likely to suddenly stop getting apps responding.

I'm not just "timing out" too early and not letting the system "catch up" - I've just tested it, and one application (Firefox) had still not been displayed after 7 minutes - but it immediately activated when I hit a key.

My "workaround" is to just use the Alt, ctrl, or shift keys as the "trigger", and that works OK, but I'd like to find out why this has suddenly started happening.

The only software (machine changes) of ANY kind in the past 10 days has been Windows updates - no drivers, no application patches, no firmware, no new app upgrades, nothing.

If you'd like any more information, let me know what you need (and how to get it if it's not standard stuff like msconfig, SIV, Everest, dxdiag, etc), and I'll get it to you.
Hope this rings a bell.

That's really strange, and sorry, does not ring a bell. What happens if you enable NS task management and use the tasklist?

Other than that, my advice is for you to be on the lookout for the NEXT private beta of Winstep Xtreme 8.1 on the Beta Discussion forums, since I've changed a bit the way windows are handled by the task manager.

If I use the NS tasklist manager, it works fine. No "nobody's home" problems, although I've only tried it for an hour or so.

I've also tried turning off the zoom, the window preview, and so on. I'm starting to think that one of the windows updates might have broken something, because I notice the windows really-truly task manager also suddenly seems to have problems identifying foreground (non-service) processes. I've raised that on the MS forums, maybe someone there might help...

I can't wait to try out (try out : Thrash to death) the 8.x beta...

Hmmmm.... I just noticed that the task manager (non-NS) does exactly the same thing. It's almost like another application is silently taking focus before the target window can respond to the "bring to front' msg. I'll keep trying things out. I don't think it's a WS/NS problem any more. Sorry.