One of the serious problems in Microsoft Windows which regularly trips me up is this: I’m typing in a window, or about to type into a window, and another grabs focus.
The worst example of this is when a dialog appears asking an important
question, just as you’re about to press Escape,
Return or Space. Often when this happens I don’t
even get a chance to see what the dialog was and therefore have no idea what
the consequences of my action would be.
Windows has a ‘you need to reboot’ dialog which sometimes spontaneously appears after it’s done software updates. When this one appears, you can reboot your system without intending to.
I think the best solution to this would be to have some kind of ‘Important Message Queue’ which sits unobtrusively on the screen. I can’t see it happening, though. Recklessness seems to be forgivable at Microsoft.