SOLVED Background apps freeze when focused on BeamNG.drive

I'm facing a strange issue with BeamNG.drive on my Windows 11 system. All my drivers are up to date, and everything generally works perfectly. However, whenever I start a free roam session and choose a map, my car spawns, but then things get weird.
As soon as I click on the BeamNG.drive window, all background processes freeze. YouTube videos stop playing, the taskbar clock stops updating, Discord and all other applications essentially turn into "screenshots". This doesn't happen with other games. I've tried reinstalling the game, verifying integrity, running it in safe mode, disabling game modes, adjusting power settings (set to maximum performance), and disabling optimizing settings in Windows 11. Switching between windowed and fullscreen modes also didn't help. Despite all these attempts, the problem persists: as soon as I focus on the BeamNG.drive window, everything else freezes. Even when hovering over buttons in apps my cursor doesn't change as it normally would when pointing at a button.

 

Do you have any software that modifies the OS? Maybe try a Windows clean boot?

 

thanks! clean boot did work, now i'll be going through each application to find the imposter

 

You're welcome! Hope you can easily find that problematic application