When the mouse is moved over an open window it automatically sets the focus to that particular window. It does not bring the window to the foreground of the open windows.

Auto-raise a neat configuration setting is possessed by the X Window system. If this setting's in effect, you don't have to click on a window to bring it to the front of the window stack. Instead of clicking, just passing the mouse over a window raises it. This takes a little getting used to, but once you've made the adjustment you'll find that it eliminates a lot of extra mouse clicks.

NT does something similar: when you put the mouse in window, it can automatically set the focus to a window, but it won't raise that window to the top of the stack.

For this, go to Start > Run menu, enter "regedit" and navigate to the registry path listed below [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse\]. You can create a DWORD value "ActiveWindowTracking", if this value does not exist.

Now, right-click and modify the value to "1" to enable active window tracking. However, if you want to get back to the original state and disable it, change the value to "0".

To setup settings go to the registry path [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\]. There you can change two values.

First value is a DWORD value "ActiveWndTrkTimeout". You can create this value if it doesn't exist. Now, right-click and modify the value to number which will represent delay for switching between two windows in milliseconds. Default value is "0" milliseconds.

Second value is binary (REG_BINARY) value. This value is called "UserPreferencemask" for Windows 95/98/Me or "UserPreferencesMask" for Windows 2000/XP. To force the window to come to the foreground you need to add "0x41" hex on existing mask.

Example:
If the current value is "9E, 3E, 00, 00" using a calculator add "9E" (hex) and "41" (hex), the total equals "DF" (hex). Therefore change the value "9E" to "DF" and it now becomes "DF, 3E, 00, 00".


Restart your system for the change to take effect.