Is there any way to configure windows to not change the focus?

Question

I'm tired of being in the middle of typing something, having a pop-up with a question appear, and hitting enter before reading it... (it also happens with some windows that are not pop-ups)

Do you know if there's some setting I could touch for this not to happen?

Answer 1

It suppose to be a registry change that helps with this type of situations (mentioned in this Coding Horror post about the subject of "focus stealing"). I try it, it doesn't work with all popups but helps with some of them, causing the offending application to flash in the taskbar instead of gain focus.

Answer 2

Not that I know of. This has been a plague of Windows versions for quite some time.

Answer 3

Actually Windows XP tries to avoid that. Of course some programs found a way to circumvented that. Microsoft Powertoy TweakUI has a way to turn the option on again in case it was turned off. You could also edit the registry yourself using the following information.