Windows 10: Task Manager hidden when game freezes

I think this is just a messup on the programmers part of Windows 10. I say this because I used Windows 7 and 8 since well... they came out and ALWAYS when I brought up the Task manager it would override the program I was currently in and show its window on top.

I was playing Fallout 4 and the game froze. I hit control+alt+delete to bring up the Task Manager and it was hidden behind the Fallout 4 overlay. I could access the windows sidebar and see it was up, the computer did not crash, just the game except I still had to hard-reset the computer because the Task Manager did not override FO4.

Any other way to force it to show itself or is this just something the Windows 10 devs forgot to implement like they did in 7 and 8?

:)

 

When I play any video game in fullscreen mode, game freezes.

Original title: Task Manager

After I upgraded to Win10 I have had a particular problem with Task Manager. When I play any video game in fullscreen mode, and the game suddenly freezes, the only way to close the game is through task manager. Well as always I press Ctrl+Alt+Del to launch
it, and my task bar shows up to indicate that task manager is now open. However, it does not appear on screen. At this point I click on the image in the task bar to open Task Manager, and it blinks on screen for about a fraction of a second and disappears
again. It seems that no longer in Windows 10 Task Manager is prioritized to show up on screen above everything else. Now I only wonder if there is a setting I can change to fix this problem, or whether this is a "feature" of the new Operating System.

 

Constant Blue Screens - Event ID 10016, Distributed COM Error

I changed the driver and immediately restarted but am still experiencing the freeze issue I detailed earlier. The computer will randomly become entirely unresponsive while watching a video or playing a game, but will continue that process just fine. Everything
else freezes. So for instance, if I'm watching a youtube video the youtube video will continue to play but I cannot minimize the browser, select anything from the start menu, etc. When I ctrl-alt-del I cannot select anything except the task manager. When initially
bringing up the task manager it shows that task manager is taking up ~85% of the CPU but quickly goes down after about 2 or 3 seconds - then everything becomes responsive again.

Event viewer is showing that it is a loop of DistributedCOMs errors 10016 that appears every time the freeze happens.

 

Do you have "Always on top" checked?

Task Manager Always on Top - Turn On or Off in Windows 8

 

I have a similar problem. If a fullscreen app or game crashes, I can press Ctrl+Shift+Esc and the Task Manager will not show up (with always on top enabled), and pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del does nothing so I can't log out or restart. However, if I press the power button on my computer which I've configured to shut down Windows, it will appear right before the computer shuts down (presumably because the full screen game shuts down first).

 

That works, thank you Tairiku! Before it was by default always popping up on top layer when first opened or switch to. Now it seems they changed that feature.