For the past month, I've been trying to fix an annoying problem on my XP computer of windows in any program that I'm running repeatedly losing focus. It can occur very frequently and lasts for from 1 to 5 seconds.  At these times, my tray icons show me that the computer is trying to communicate with the Internet.  Sometimes it doesn't happen for hours or even days at a time.  I have also seen an occasional phony looking message offering to get rid of "possible" viruses by downloading something or other - which I never do.  At one point I was getting short bursts of rap music from my speakers but that has stopped.

Evidently there is some sort of virus doing these things and I can't get rid of it - or them.  I run my updated Trend Micro anti-virus regularly and have used AVG, SpyBot, and Avast to no avail.  Looking at Windows Task Manager, I see a lot of I/O writes at these times from LSASS.EXE and VPROSVC.EXE, for whatever that's worth.  A Microsoft techie has given me various suggestions but none have fixed the loss of focus problem (although his suggestions have sometimes caused me other problems).  We are still working on it and getting nowhere.

Has anyone experienced this and does anyone have any suggestions about fixing it?

Hi Phil

seems to me as though you might have some form of nasty on there. LSASS.exe is a legitimate Windows process and  VPROSVC.EXE is a Norton Ghost non-essential process (ask Ray what he thinks of Norton  ;D ). However, LSASS.EXE can have a vulnerability exploited by the Sasser worm.

My next check would be to get HijackThis (from http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en-US/tools/security_tools/hijackthis) and send a log file after running it to the forum. Somebody will tell you what is wrong - if anything. You may be able to spot an unusual behavoiur pattern yourself form the logfile.

I have not used Hijackthis since Trend Micro bought it from Merijin, but can't imagine that it won't be as good as it always was. It has got several friends of mine out of trouble already.

Pip

   One possibility is that an open website is causing itself to be brought into focus which in turn causes the focused window to lose focus.