AvastUI gaming_hook

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TL;DR "gaming_hook.exe" is messing up my gaming. Need help disabling it.

Hello there! I'm new to these forums, but I've been using Avast for a long while now and I do very much like it!

I've come across a problem that I can't seem to solve! While playing online games (namely COD), the game will "lose focus" randomly, which means that the game is still visible, but my mouse and keyboard are no longer able to send input to the game until I click on the game again (I'm playing in full-screen mode). I figured it was something gone awry with a gaming overlay app or NVIDIA's ShadowPlay, so I fired up "Process Explorer" to see what application was opening mid-game. Turns out it's Avast! It's a process called "gaming_hook.exe" from "AVAST Software" as seen in the image below. It randomly opens while gaming and it's been quite a pain. I've discovered that, when the game loses focus, I can hit Alt+F4 to close the "gaming_hook.exe" and it therefore won't bother me until I next reboot, but I'm looking for a more concrete solution.

Has anyone had this problem? Does anyone know how to disable the "gaming_hook.exe" feature without opening my computer up to potential threats?

Regards.

[Asyn]

Hi, disable the behavior shield or set an exclusion.
Avast GUI -> Settings -> Components -> Behavior Shield

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Hopefully I've understood correctly. I added the directory in which my games and their data is stored to the exclusions list. I'll let you known if I run into any further trouble.

Thanks for the prompt reply.

[Asyn]

OK, you're welcome.

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Hello again.

I've been out of town, so I was unable to test whether or not this solution worked. Unfortunately, it did not. I also tried disabling Behavior Shield completely, and this did not solve the issue either. Any additional help would be appreciated.

Regards.

[Asyn]

Might be related to Avast game mode, but I don't use that. Maybe someone else can chime in.

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I noticed a problem with Game Hook today. Due to a patch, EverQuest failed to start twice. After this, I loaded Firefox and could not access my bookmarks. I noticed Game Hook was running twice, but the process could not be killed. I had to reboot my system after which Firefox ran  normally. I experimented again by letting EverQuest fail to launch with the same results.

In the past few days I also noticed a problem with firefox running in the background behind Everquest. If I minimized EverQuest and tried to access bookmarks in Firefox, I would get a glowing box around all the running programs in the taskbar and could not access the bookmarks. Maybe this was Game Hook shenanigans again.

[Cast]

If I minimized EverQuest and tried to access bookmarks in Firefox, I would get a glowing box around all the running programs in the taskbar and could not access the bookmarks. Maybe this was Game Hook shenanigans again.

This to me sounds like the sandbox however im not completely sure as its been a few years/versions since I had a paid version of avast.
Was it a certain color? Last I recall the border around programs was green.

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In case anyone else was having a similar issue, turning off gaming mode fixed the problem completely.

Odd how gaming mode is specifically for gaming, and yet it has this behavior.

Thanks all.