GZDoom and Zandronum crash catastrophically

"Catastrophically" might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but this problem is getting pretty annoying.

In both GZDoom AND Zandronum, the frame will freeze up, the sound will stop, but the mouse cursor will still be visible. This seems to happen only when I'm using fullscreen mode and something pops up in the background like McAfee hammering me to buy another subscription (Hell no) or Steam asking if I want to update. To get out of it, I have to manually restart my computer.

Is there anything I can do in the applications or in windows I can do about it, or will I just have to deal with this?

Something's definitely objecting to being interrupted. What video hardware are you using and when was the driver last updated?

Have you tried disabling pop-ups in the offending applications, or shutting them down while playing?

GreyGhost said:

Something's definitely objecting to being interrupted. What video hardware are you using and when was the driver last updated?

Have you tried disabling pop-ups in the offending applications, or shutting them down while playing?

Thank you for responding. The apps open themselves, (Even if they're not running) which might force me to uninstall. I'll try disabling pop-ups, but I don't know if I can do that with all of them. I'll just try uninstalling the useless ones. I also forgot to mention that this only happens on my laptop, (I can easily use the windows key to get out on my desktop computer) which is using an AMD x8650. I'll try your solution out.

Do you have any problem if playing in windowed mode? I think adding a windowed fullscreen mode (borderless window at desktop resolution -- looks like fullscreen, but isn't treated as such by the OS) could solve this kind of problems.

On Windows there is a Scheduled Tasks icon in the Control Panel
(at least on this XP system). Go in there and kill or disable anything annoying, or change its attributes.