Hey everyone,

Thanks to the community with being so helpful to me as I joined up and am trying to get accustomed to PC gaming. Everyone has been very friendly and helpful, so I feel a little bad for all the questions... but here's one more, just in case anyone more tech-minded than me knows what's going on.

1) On pretty much any game I play from GOG, at seemingly random intervals the game will crash back to desktop, with the icon at the bottom as if I'd minimized the game, and a simple click on the icon brings the game back up. Any idea why this is happening or what it means?

2) More specifically, on Jagged Alliance 2 (and this title alone, so far), instead of bringing back up the game when I click on its taskbar icon, the screen cuts out for a moment, comes back more "pixely" in a zoomed-in view of the bottom left of my desktop, and the mouse icon is nowhere to be found and seemingly does nothing unless I bring up the start menu. My only choice at this point seems to be a restart, and since I haven't been able to play long enough to get past the character creation, I'm not getting much fun out of it.

That's it. If anyone has any advice they feel like sharing, I'd be very happy to hear it. Thanks again guys!

I'll try to think of a way to make it up to the community... brownies maybe?

What are your system specs?

If the game comes back up when you click on it in the taskbar then it didn't crash. Crashing means that the game hangs up or terminates itself. If the game still runs it was only minimized.

Most likely you minimized the game without wanting to. There are several ways to do so. The most common (sorted by likelihood) are:

*) Accidentally pressing the Windows key. That's the one between Ctrl and Alt. Gamers have often cursed Windows or their keyboards because of this key.

*) Clicking outside of the program screen. If you have two screens hooked up to your PC and the second screen is configured as an extended desktop then moving the mouse outside of the screen is possible if the game doesn't limit the mouse movement to its game area. If you click outside of the game screen you will usually minimize the game.

*) Accidentally pressing a keyboard shortcut with a specific meaning in Windows will often minimize a game. For example Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Alt-Del, Ctrl-Shift-Esc, Alt-F4 (this will even end the game). Most of them are hard to press by accident but Alt and Tab are often used for games and if you press them at the same time you will send the game to the background.

*) Pressing Shift five times in a row. When you do this you will get a popup that asks if you want to enable Sticky Keys which will send the game to the background. Sticky Keys is an accessibility feature of Windows that helps people who have trouble pressing several keys at once. But since Shift is often used in games and you do often press keys several times in a row in a game Sticky Keys has also caught many gamers unaware. But you can turn this popup off. See here.

*) Any program that runs in the background and can give you a prompt at any time can also force the game to the background. Serial offenders here are firewalls and Antivirus programs. That's why many of these programs also often have a game mode in which they don't generate prompts.

One of the above is most likely the reason for your problems. Hope this helps.

I don't know why this sometimes helps me with your problem but you can test it anyway.
Have a program running that takes all the screen, maximised and then start your game. It's something I discovered by accident when I tried to start programs that started and then promptly got minimised.

It's not a real solution but worth a try.
I think the real problem is Geralt_of_Rivia's last point and my "solution" for some reason helps with it. Sometimes.

Thank you all for the input!

Misteryo, I'm Windows 8 64 bit, Intel i7-3770 @ 3.4, plenty of space, enough VRAM for most of the games I have but admittedly the bare minimum for a few newer ones.

Geralt (btw, love your games) it's definitely not anything to do with the keyboard, as with a few of the games (like JA2 or This War of Mine), I'm not even touching it. It's just random. So your last point makes a lot of sense and it may just be my antivirus. Guess I'll look into it, thanks.

And worse comes to worse, mabye I'll try Tarm's tactic. Who knows, it might just do the trick!

Thank you again guys! Sorry I forget to label this topic a question :P

There are also cases where popups of any kind will push your game to the taskbar. For instance the web mail checker I use pops a notification up and that forces many of my games from fullscreen. Make sure if you have anything running in the background that there's nothing that automagically pushes itself to the forefront.
EDIT: I see Geralt of Rivia covered that. But there it is anyhow.

My guess is you have some process running that brings the desktop to the foreground. JA2 issue is probably more an issue with getting switched to the background, and I would not focus on that.

I would kill unneeded processes, and try playing a game till I found the offending process.

Ok, thanks guys! I'll keep looking into it.

It feels like, when JA2 is being re-maximized, unlike other games that just simply go back into the game, my mouse cursor still "thinks" that it's on the game screen (there's a small black rectangle in the upper left corner that looks like the game screen is attempting to exist, but failing) despite me still viewing my zoomed-in, non-optimal resolution desktop -- if I press the Start key, or bring up Task manager I am allowed use of my mouse again. Attempting to re-maximize JA2 from this messed up screen returns me to my normal, optimal resolution desktop (and the cycle can repeat from there if I attempt to bring up JA2 again).

But I'll look into the background issues.

I haven't played GOGs version of JA2 so I'm asking if it runs by dosbox in a way that it starts several windows? Because that sounds like a dosbox window, or some other window that starts with the game are competing for being on top with the "game" window.

Edit: I have a bit of a hangover so forgive me if I'm not making much sense. :P

No worries, it's not you at all, I'm just not overly familiar with these things as I'm relatively brand new to PC gaming.

do you have DirectX 9c installed?

Win7 and Win8 have the newest DirectX, but it doesn't have the files or library entries compatible with DX 9c which is needed for most old games. . Perhaps this might help the games run on your system.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34429

GoG should really have links and tips about installing this on the front page.

Thanks! I'll check it out.

I used to have a mouse which had a dedicated shoulder button for the windows search function. It was placed in a way that made it really easy to press it by accident when playing an FPS game, which would also promptly minimize the game.

Great fun in multiplayer O_o