full -screen mode wss lost. (-1)Follow

SE's full screen mode is a royal pain in the butt. Alt Tab by accident and poof your session is toast.

What I would recommend is get windower (or windower lite if you don't want the plug ins). You can configure it so that you get full screen and if you alt tab or something tries to take the screen at least you won't be booted.

This used to happen to me quite a bit. It ended up being my Firewall just randomly popping up alerts that demanded front row attention, and FFXI went "Ok! POOF".

That said, try seeing if things are popping up for attention (a virus / adware scan wouldn't hurt), or if you got programs that want constant attention.

If nothing else, use windowed mode (which you can actually full size like any other Windows window, to take up the whole screen)

I have the same problem, it appears to have no real trigger but happens randomly. I have run file checker on both FFXI and POL and come up with nothing. No window pops up when it happens, but to be sure I looked around with msconfig and see nothing that could be stealing focus.

Using the official windower does work to keep it from closing to desktop, although you can still see it trying to lose priority, but that thing has never been as fleshed out as I would like.

Another poster mentioned that a reinstall of POL corrected his issue so that may be my next step.

catwho, try CTRL+Shift+Esc to go straight to task manager.

Also, since UAC promts tend to kill even Windowed mode, I turned down the UAC setting in Windows 7 so that it wouldn't flash the screen. Even Firefox can unexpectedly call UAC when it wants an update.

Edited, Nov 11th 2009 10:13am by Whogie

Did you happen to recently upgrade AVG from 8.5 to 9.0? I did a few days ago and now I lose focus every 30 mins on the nose. If I alt-tab right after it happens I get a little AVG icon that quickly disappears. I checked out the AVG forums and it seems they know about the issue and are hopefully pushing out a fix soon.

one thing i liked full screen mode is you can move your mouse cursor very fast.
in windowed mode, mouse speed is really slow.

anyone have an idea how to make mouse move more smoother?

So if it is AVG 9.0 then looks like I'll have to disable it everytime I play. *sigh*

I had this issue with AVG 9.0 after upgrading from 8.5. From everything I had read on the topic it seems as though there is some code in 8.5 to trigger a pop up prompting upgrading to 9.0 that does not get handled properly when the upgrade setup is gone through so it acts as if it would pop up the prompt but does not actually find anything to pop up.

This got really annoying, what I ended up doing was uninstalling AVG completely and removing all the settings etc and then just installing 9.0 from a fresh install and the problem has not been occuring since.

Some people have reported that this solution only works until you reboot your PC though, although personally I haven't had the problem reoccur after I did the fresh install. I am not sure if that is because I use one of the paid versions though rather than the free version - I have a friend who used the free version and did the same thing and they do not seem to have the problem though.