Alright, this is driving me mad, and I’ve been unable to figure out what’s causing it. It only happens with overwatch. No other games have this issue…
Essentially while playing a really intense game of overwatch that requires a lot of button inputs, the action center will randomly open. This manifests in 2 ways… sometimes the action center just covers up half my game while I’m playing. Other times it just tabs me out of overwatch entirely. It specifically seems to happen at times when I’m pressing multiple buttons and have to turn my mouse sharply to the right.
Now I’ve already tried many things to fix this. Disable Windows Game Bar, Disabling the Windows Key, Disabling Fullscreen Optimizations in the menus, using borderless windowed instead of fullscreen. I deleted Whatpulse to see if it was causing the issues (it was not). I moved my taskbar back to the default location on the bottom. I’ve disabled the action center button on the taskbar. I’ve enabled focus assist while gaming. I’ve updated both my Nvidia GPU drivers and my Intel HD Graphics drivers. I’m at a loss of what else to try and it’s driving me mad. Any help would be appreciated.
Specs:
Windows 10 Home Edition, October 2020 Update (20H2 Build 19042.608)
Intel Core i7-9750H
Nvidia Geforce RTX 2060
16 GB of RAM
144 hz screen
Have you tried Windows Focus Logger to see what’s triggering the panel opening?
I’ll report back with what I get from this. Never knew that program was a thing.
Edit: Shell Experience Host. Great. Doesn’t actually help. 
Howdy MoiraPrime,
You could disable those notifications by following these steps. However it would probably be best to investigate why these are happening and fix the root cause.
Yeah that’s the problem. How the hell do you figure out the root cause? I’m not disabling the action center altogether.
Since Windows isn’t our product we can’t really help you much more with that outside of suggesting some basic windows troubleshooting steps. You can see if the same thing happens on a new admin account and check for system file corruption. I’d also make sure windows is fully up to date (including optional updates which aren’t necessarily bundled in the periodic updates) in case it’s just some bug.
Beyond that, another player can try to help you with it, or you can contact Microsoft for more windows troubleshooting help, or you can just reinstall Windows from scratch and see if the issue persists. It shouldn’t - but if it did it would narrow things down an absolute ton.
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Alright, it took me a bit to figure this out but I think I finally got it. To be specific, I’m on a windows laptop. Windows has a default feature that disables the touchpad whenever a mouse is connected… now you’d expect this would disable the touchpad gestures, right? Well, it doesn’t and one of the touchpad gestures is a 3 finger tap to open the action center. In some cases your wrist on the touchpad can briefly trigger this.
To fix it, do the following: Go to Settings > Devices > Touchpad, then set all the touchpad gestures to “Nothing”. Hope this helps someone!
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