[Dave2000]

Ever since using Kodi 17.0 I've been having an issue with Kodi minimizing itself to the lower left corner of my screen with a black background. It happened twice during while watching a movie and happened once while doing nothing in the music section of Kodi after about 10 minutes of my PC being idle. When this happen, my remote does not respond and I have to use my keyboard instead to navigate. I'm using Windows 10 Home and have Windows auto updates set to disabled in services.msc. I disabled Windows auto updates because it was also causing Kodi to minimize itself to the lower left corner of my screen and was interfering with my movie watching through Kodi. I also disabled auto update notifications in Kodi. After disabling Windows auto updates, Kodi minimizing with a black background happens less often but it's still happened again. I also have Launcher4Kodi setup to run Kodi in the Laucher4Kodi Shell instead of the Windows explorer shell. Could it be something to do with Windows 10 background activities interfering with Kodi or is this a Kodi 17.0 issue?

My system:

Intel NUC6i3SYH
8GB RAM
120GB SSD
Windows 10 Home

[PatK]

Could it be something to do with Windows 10 background activities interfering with Kodi

Yes it's likely something external is stealing the focus as Kodi functions are programmed to not interfere. A debug is not going to show this issue, but monitoring with MS process explorer should give a clue. One of things I would do would be to set the priority of Kodi to high and watch for process that override this. I would also be tempted to run Kodi directly from the desktop, it might surprise me to hear that "Launcher4Kodi setup to run Kodi in the Laucher4Kodi Shell instead of the Windows explorer shell" was the villain.

[Dave2000]

Could it be something to do with Windows 10 background activities interfering with Kodi

Yes it's likely something external is stealing the focus as Kodi functions are programmed to not interfere. A debug is not going to show this issue, but monitoring with MS process explorer should give a clue. One of things I would do would be to set the priority of Kodi to high and watch for process that override this. I would also be tempted to run Kodi directly from the desktop, it might surprise me to hear that "Launcher4Kodi setup to run Kodi in the Laucher4Kodi Shell instead of the Windows explorer shell" was the villain.

The problem with running Kodi inside the Windows Explorer shell (the interface after the Windows logon screen) is that whenever my internet connection goes out, the internet browser will load up automatically which then steals focus from Kodi. Kodi will minimze when that happens. Using Launcher4Kodi set to run Kodi outside the Windows Explorer shell or doing a registry edit to run Kodi outside of Windows Explorer shell is a workaround to the webpage loading up that is stealing focus from Kodi. However focus is getting stolen from Kodi, though less often, when running Kodi outside the Windows Explorer shell. I'm tempted just to buy a Nvidia Shield and run Kodi on that. Does Kodi on the Nvidia Shield have this issue with focus getting stolen at times?

[Dave2000]

I also tried LibreElec 8.0.1 and I get more issues with Librelec than Kodi (running through Windows 10 Home), so I would rather stick with Kodi. The issues I have with LibreElec is that VC1-Vappi hardware acceleration on my NUC causes artifacts in VC1 encoded videos in some spots. I also get lip sync issues in LibreElec, and sometimes my NUC will power back on after turning it off through Librelec either with my remote or through the shutdown menu. So as you can see, LibreElec is not usable for me. So I recently installed the Always-On-Top version of Kodi 17.1 and I will keep running Kodi outside of Windows Explorer by using Launcher4Kodi.I will keep Windows auto updates disabled through services.msc. Maybe doing all this will prevent Kodi from minimizing while using Windows 10 Home as the OS?