About once every minute or so, when I'm typing or scrolling in FF, Skype or whatever, something steals focus from me and freezes what I'm doing for about 3 seconds before returning to normal. How can I find out what is doing it? Nothing I know of is running, but I'm sure it's something in the background.

Bump. This can't be that hard to figure out can it? Who can help me?

There's not enough information to give you an answer. Your computer could be too slow, you could have OS problems, a memory stick could be acting up, a bad browser update, or this could be malware.

Assuming you can rule out the hardware, you can click Ctrl-Alt-Delete and open up the task manager, check out processes running. Sort by CPU and see if any particular processes catch your eye when you have this freeze up happen. Then sort by memory and do the same. Maybe the culprit will become obvious. Maybe running CCleaner will help, if not visit the malware sticky.

Thanks. Looks like I found the culprit thanks to your help. It is ComUpdatus.exe, which I guess is NVidia checking for updates every 60 seconds! I went into services and changed the NVidia update to manual instead of automatic start and that eliminated the problem.

Is there any danger in disabling that? How diligent do I need to be now about manually checking for NVidia updates? I have no idea why it started doing that every minute.

I don't see why it would need to check for updates every 60 minutes. You did the right thing, I wouldn't worry about it any more since the process checks out.

Most likely Nvidia had some new driver for your graphics, Windows Update spotted it & included it in your last batch of updates. If so, you can go to Windows Update and change settings to let you choose which updates to install manually. That's what I do, and unless I see some reason to I don't necessarily get new video drivers if the ones I have are working fine.

Thanks Gonso. Are you on PStars? I'll ship you something.