I notice that while CI is running, all items in the Windows Task Scheduler are disabled. Further investigation shows that this is common to several of your games, including CI4, CI5, and Piggly. And because the scheduled tasks include several updaters including some antivirus stuff, I find this concerning.
Is there some way of stopping this? For that matter, how is it done? There are some scheduled things that I really don’t want even to be delayed from running. I appreciate that a player wouldn’t want to be interrupted for trivial things, but the global disruption of scheduled tasks seems excessive to me. It even knocks out tasks that are tagged with “Run with highest privileges” and “Hidden”, and this happens for the entire time the game is running, rather than just when time-critical things are happening.
And it happens only when the game is in full-screen mode. If I toggle between full-screen mode and windowed, the tasks all toggle between being disabled and whatever they were before this stuff.
The game doesn’t control that. Windows probably won’t run any tasks while a full-screen application is active.
I don’t have a lot of things that run in full-screen mode, but I tested them. A demo of Bejewelled Twist, a finding-objects game from Big Fish, a couple of games on BlueStacks in full-screen mode, and VirtualBox… none of them affect the Scheduled Tasks.
What version of Windows are you using?
Windows 8.1 . Home edition, or personal edition, or whatever it’s called.
What, for having/using 8.1? I’m not keen on it, but machines using 7 were getting harder to find, and I thought that 8.1 would be better than 8. And everything I’ve seen and heard of 10 makes me glad I’m not dealing with that mess.
It’s not that bad, if you ignore the features that were kept from win 8. And if you don’t mind having to uſe google to learn how to change even the ſimpleſt of ſettings. And once you ſpend ſome time to improve it for yourſelf. I uſe a claſſic ſtart menu extenſion thingimabob I found online which emulates the earlier ſtart menu deſign ſo I don’t have to deal with the “modern” look, as well as ſeveral other things I’ve changed to make it better for me. Including, if you’re curiöus, reprogramming my keyboard key by key. Sure, noöne elſe knows where the ſpace bar is, but who cares?
I tested another 5 or 6 full-screen games this evening, in a variety of styles. None of them blocked the scheduled tasks.
They can be in windowed mode without borders which looks just like full screen.
While this is behaviour certainly odd, there is nothing in the game that controls whether scheduled tasks run or not. Task manager decides that on its own, and apparently DirectX 9.0 full-screen is a criterion.
In any case, I find the lack of on-line information about this behaviour disconcerting 
Year 2007, everything was more simple…
According to my system diagnostics, I’ve got DirectX 11. Same problem? Or is this a case of “DirectX stuff built into the app” vs. “DirectX stuff running in the OS” client/server kind of thing?
Thank you so much, Microsloth. While I was trying to figure out what might interfere with the Scheduled Tasks, I found a page of Microsloth developers getting all snotty about the idiocy of some customer who actually went and disabled the task scheduler on his machine. So much critical stuff depends on it! Ha ha, what a stupid thing to do!
The game uses DirectX 9.0 (regardless of which version you have installed on your machine).
I ran a quick test by creating a custom scheduler task, and it ran just fine while CI4 was full-screen. So I don’t really know what to suggest here, perhaps your graphics card driver is to blame? Or maybe your screen capturing / video software?
Maybe. 
Where did you find the information about DirectX 9.0 and the scheduler? That might point me towards figuring out what to test.
Bump. If you wouldn’t mind, please… I’ve been having no luck finding any mention of this.
As I said, I haven’t been able to find anything concrete either 
I was simply guessing that this behaviour is somehow caused by DirectX 9.0. But since then my tests have suggested that DirectX is not really the problem (since scheduled tasks are not disabled when I try it on my machine). It’s something else, but I don’t know what.
Let me toss this out to everyone else, then. Would you folks mind taking a quick look at the History of any current item in your Task Scheduler and see if it’s showing that it was disabled when you started playing CI, and reenabled when you stopped? I’ve since found two more games that show this behaviour, i.e. everything’s fine in windowed mode but the scheduled tasks are blocked in full-screen mode.