Alt+tab Issues (Nov 2025)

Hello all,

making a post here since this is being pervasive.

A lot of people are reporting an issue where they are unable to alt+tab across FFXI instances. There's a few different flavors of the issue, but most of them appear to be caused by the discord overlay.

Try to disable the discord overlay for FFXI, and see if it solves the issue. You don't need to disable it entirely, you can just disable it for FFXI specifically.

Another confirmation that to be on 6 PCs and 6 Keyboards has its advantages. :P

Switch focus was a god send for getting around the alt tabbing changes. Would highly recommend it.

Huh, I wonder if this is the cause for a strange behavior for Controller/Hybrid I’ve been seeing only just recently. I always just move the mouse and click on the window of whichever alt to control them directly but lately it’s been attempting to clone all inputs across all characters, movements and all lol. Can be useful in some instances but not when I can’t control it 0_0.

The work-around I found was the click anywhere on the desktop background BEFORE attempting to select another character lol hopefully this is just something weird with Discord and this change fixes the shenanigans. Thanks for that.

I'm a controller guy myself. I had found that if I clicked the FFXIDB map addon that it would send my controller inputs to every instance of FFXI. That stopped working, but it was super useful for stuff like Oseem, D.box, gob box, ect. I'd love to be able to toggle that.

I'm having an issue where I need to push alt tab multiple times to get to a ffxi instance, even though it should have been the next window. This is on windows 11. It's very annoying.

I'm having this issue too, I thought it was just me! It's specifically FFXI that's like... being resistant? sliding away from? alt-tabs. And I've never had a discord overlay on anything, ever, so it's not that.

This is caused by a change in how windows treats apps that disallow windows key. if you want normal alt tab you have to allow windows key through. The rise of this issue is why the switch_focus addon was written.

Honestly, I didn't even know I had the windows key disallowed - how do I just set it to allowed? I don't care if I open up my Start menu midgame and I'm not using it for any keybinds.

set Allow Windows Key to ON in the windower launcher, it is on the advanced page of the profile settings iirc

Acktually, thinking about it more and more, I'm having multiple issues with alt-tab. One is generic (happens in other full-screen games as well, but not other "software"), the rest are FFXI specific.
Let me try to throw them here, someone might have a vague idea on what the cause could be, there could be multiple ones!
This PC is fairly new (got it february/march last year) and these issues I'm experiencing started somewhat around january/february 2025, after a Windows 11 update but that could be just a coincidence.


General issue:
When I alt-tab back into a game, the screen image is "fixed", nothing moves, like it's a screenshot. The game actually feels my inputs from keyboard and pad and I can hear it from sound effects but on screen I can see a "picture" of my game's screen. How to solve it? Alt tab out, then alt tab back.

FFXI specific issues:
1) When I alt tab back to the game, the ALT macro is stuck on screen. Anything I try to type or to do, it's like I'm holding down the "alt" button. How to fix? Press the alt/ctrl keys once, the issue disappears.
2) When I tab OUT of FFXI (i.e. I go to another windows11 window, whatever it may be) the game somehow gets "stuck". I don't see or feel anything, but other people in game can see me red-dotting.
If I alt-tab back into the game, I notice for a nanosecond I had a red dot on my head.
If too much time passes, my character eventually DCs and when I go back to the game I see the FFXI POL error "network communication lost" or whatever it is, and after I press ok I get back to the char select screen.
How to Fix it? Well, I need to go back to the FFXI window within a certain amount of time, otherwise I'll just DC, no fix.
3) I can't alt-tab back to the game. I'm on Windows doing something, say browsing stuff on Chrome, use Alt-tab or windows-tab to go back to the FFXI. Nothing happens, I remain to my Windows software, whatever it may be. I try to click on the FFXI icon in my taskbar, nothing happens.
How to solve? Well, reduce all other software/windows to the taskbar, then FFXI will appear on my screen (was always there, on the background after all). If I click anywhere on the screen, everything is solved.


Strange thing for all these issues, as far as I can tell they NEVER happen if I use //game_minimize instead of simply alt-tabbing in and out.
Also another strange thing, these things are not happening all of the times, only sometimes, randomly. /shrug

Posting in this thread because I didn't realize there was a main thread for this thissue, and I wanted Olly to take note of his Windows update.


This is what I run right now:



...But I noticed that Windows re-installed this update and is asking me to reboot as we speak. I'll have to update this thread to see if it comes back (and needs to be uninstalled again). When did Windows make updates so shitty? Jeez....

Anyway, for your specific issue, (1) Enable the windows key (2) Disable discord overlay (just for FFXI, don't try to use legacy-overlay with FFXI yet)(3) use the Windower addon "switch focus" or the Ashita addon "focuser".

I'm posting this because when I do reboot, the Windows update will have re-applied itself and I can repeat the above steps (and do some additional testing with the discord overlay).

Will try this when I get home, thank you either way.

Phew I'm glad it wasnt just me having this problem. It was ongoing for a good week until I figured out it was discord's fault and did this fix x.x

Yes. this was drtiving me crazy, it was discord overlay

I've run into something similar however it has not affected FFXI for me - rather it has been a bother for Notepad++. Frequently when I alt-tab to it from FFXI (possibly others as well but I notice it primarily from the game) it will behave as though the alt key is still pressed and when I start to type it instead tries to navigate the menus with my keypresses.

A bit of googling led me to https://superuser.com/questions/1700798/windows-11-alt-tab-keeps-alt-pressed where they suggested PowerToys or other applications that 'register global keyboard hotkeys' as possibly causing the issue. I do have PowerToys running and if I exit PowerToys, Discord and Steam that maybe reduces its frequency. But what really seems to cause it to occur most regularly is how quickly I press and release Alt-Tab. If I press them and then tab through some of the windows it doesn't seem to occur at all. If I have just FFXI and NP++ open and very rapidly tap the buttons to swap back and forth then it happens very regularly. Or if I just pause briefly and don't release the Alt button until NP++ has taken focus then it seems fine as well.

Well a guy at discord did say a bug was found that "causes the wrong window to get focus after alt tabbing" we are not sure if this is infact the root cause of the issue that people have been seeing but that is just some more info we know

This is exactly what happens.
Only with windows 11 with me though, not 10.

guy at Discord?

There is a guy who works at discord in the windower discord.

I don't suppose this person would be interested in resolving a pretty gross memory leak with Discord.exe? (This commit size grows and I've watched it go as high as 22GB and even over several hundred GB; My machine has 96GB of RAM and 24 cores, so discord is being greedy, I can provide a dump / memory profile / etc).