3D Studio constantly stealing focus... from itself?

Tools 3ds Max
#1

Has anyone else ever experienced this? It’s weird.

I can open up the Listener, hold down a key to make it repeat, and the UI will eventually flash, the command panel will do a complete blank and refresh, and one of the viewports will now have focus instead of the Listener. It happens a lot. Something like at least once a minute. Sometimes it happens several times in a row.

I’ve only been able to find one other person online with s similar issue. If anyone has any input, I’d love it. I’ve got an animator who’s going a little nuts with this issue. It also makes it really hard to troubleshoot scripts on his machine with focus constantly getting stolen.

#2

I don’t have much experience with Max, but maybe this can help.

I know in maya, when using pyside to create GUIs, you can lose focus when trying to use the Shift-key to type upper case letters into a text field if the UI is floating over a viewport.
maya will intercepting the key press and interpreting it as a hotkey and give focus to the viewport rather than letting the GUI have the input.

we have to put special events in place to trap Shift, Ctrl, Alt so the user can actually type into the GUI. really annoying.