heya,

A strange problem on osx developed this afternoon where any program will lose focus to its windows but the program itself remains active. It's really irritating to be typing and then suddenly not, but you're still in the program; just that the window is now not the focus.
It's like a program is popping into existance and then dying. I can't seem to trace what it is. There's nothing in the logs, no noticeable disk activity, nothing wrong with the disks. I've booted up from the install CD and run a disk check on the system and second HDD without any errors

does anyone know what this problem might be, or a way to track it down?

Seems like a timer-based bug Apple hid in the OS to go off just on this specific day to push you into upgrading to 10.4.

I've only ever seen such odd behaviour with Firefox - and that thing is riddled with bugs (I still use it of course).

Bruno

the strange thing is that i've had it before, but a disk check seemed to clear it up.

It happens in any program, all the time, every 30 - 45 seconds or so

I've had this happen to me with both Firefox and Safari. No idea how to get rid of it... I usually have to do a forcequit.

just done a test. Reliably 15 seconds between focus blurring. completely application independent.
What progs would be running a check every 15 secs?

I'm (finally) doing a follow up to this problem

I found that the issue was with having a network connection shortcut on the dock. Can anyone else confirm this type of behaviour?
It was a shortcut to the root directory of a window share in OSX 10.3.6