NaturallySpeaking Tips 01/05/2005

This page, so far, contains only 1 tip. I anticipate adding others in the future.

Foreground Registry Hack (Focus issue):

Starting at least in version 6 (or was it just in Windows 2000 or XP?), I have experienced a phenomenon where the "focus" switching has not fully taken effect. This may take a few different forms, but for me it is where a window or dialog box only partially has the "focus". For instance, I may have said "correct that", but the correction window did not actually come to the foreground. Rather, I have had to "Alt tab" my way to get there. Another manifestation is that the application that I want to be in "focus" has its position on the Taskbar turn blue, but does not actually become visible, and clicking the Taskbar or "Alt tab" is necessary to actually get the application in direct "focus".

I believe that there is a TweakUI program out there that will fix this problem, but it also does some other things that you may or may not want or need. The following registry change will directly fix this and only this problem.

If you are comfortable and confident with registry editing, guide yourself to the following registry location:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]

The value of interest is "ForegroundLockTimeout". The default value (I believe) is 20000. The value that will fix the above type problems is 0. If your value is not 0, change it to 0.

You may also use this link to set the value to 0 without using the Registry editor. You may use 'Open' to directly import the Registry change, or 'Save' the file foreground.reg somewhere on your hard drive, then execute it from there. In either case, you will see a prompt along the lines of "Are you sure you want to add the information in this file to the registry?"

I believe I first learned of this trick at the ScanSoft forum, but I find I need it when ever I do a fresh install of Windows 2000 or XP, so it is probably worth documenting for all.