Cursor Selecting Edge of Windows

In the Win 10 that runs on my work PC, the cursor behavior to select the edge of a window in order to resize it with mouse is driving me nuts and I cannot figure out what setting to reconfigure to change the behavior.

The expected behavior is that when moving mouse to edge of window and the cursor hovers over the edge of the window, the cursor changes to an up-down/left-right/diagonal arrow and clicking the mouse enables manual window resizing.

The behavior that I observe is that the region where this behavior is enabled is now expanded beyond the edge of the window.. In other words, I can move the mouse so that the cursor is no longer over the active window, but instead over another window in the background, yet the cursor still associates with the active window and clicking activates the resize action.

The reason this is driving me nuts is that when I move the cursor off of the active window to another window in the background and click, what I actually want to do is activate that background window. The new behavior makes this routine action very troublesome. It becomes particularly annoying when the active window is placed such that there is not much screen real estate between its edge and the edge of the screen.

Is there a way to adjust settings so that this undesirable behavior is ended, i.e, the sensitivity of the cursor placement to the edge of active window is more sensitive, and therefore easier to select a background window when that is in fact where I place the cursor?

Spent countless time browsing Settings options and searching forums for a solution but much less a solution I haven't found someone articulate the same problem statement.

Appreciate help anyone can give.

SecureBatman said:

In the Win 10 that runs on my work PC, the cursor behavior to select the edge of a window in order to resize it with mouse is driving me nuts and I cannot figure out what setting to reconfigure to change the behavior.

The expected behavior is that when moving mouse to edge of window and the cursor hovers over the edge of the window, the cursor changes to an up-down/left-right/diagonal arrow and clicking the mouse enables manual window resizing.

The behavior that I observe is that the region where this behavior is enabled is now expanded beyond the edge of the window.. In other words, I can move the mouse so that the cursor is no longer over the active window, but instead over another window in the background, yet the cursor still associates with the active window and clicking activates the resize action.

The reason this is driving me nuts is that when I move the cursor off of the active window to another window in the background and click, what I actually want to do is activate that background window. The new behavior makes this routine action very troublesome. It becomes particularly annoying when the active window is placed such that there is not much screen real estate between its edge and the edge of the screen.

Is there a way to adjust settings so that this undesirable behavior is ended, i.e, the sensitivity of the cursor placement to the edge of active window is more sensitive, and therefore easier to select a background window when that is in fact where I place the cursor?

Spent countless time browsing Settings options and searching forums for a solution but much less a solution I haven't found someone articulate the same problem statement.

Appreciate help anyone can give.

OMG, what can I do in windows 11 if I *don't* want the cursor to transform into a manual window resizing cursor? In Meshroom software there are several kebab menu items (vertical 3 dots button) that are the sole way to access various drop down menus and for every single one of them on my windows 11 laptop the cursor turns into a manual window resizing cursor and no amount of clicking anywhere near the kebab menus will access those menus. All I can do is move the margins of the windows left right or up and down. This is a windows 10/windows 11 issue because on my windows 10 machine I can access the kebab menus just fine. Unfortunately the windows 11 machine has my cuda compatible NVIDIA card so I *must* use that machine.

How do I block the appearance of the resize cursor in windows 11?

@Batman: I'm surprised that is has been three months with no answer to your problem.

I know there's a way to adjust the border size and behavior ... I've done it. But that was long ago and I don't remember how.

But experts here (such as Try3) know how to do just about everything in Windows. Maybe this taunt will bring him into the discussion.

There are registry settings that control the 'active region' within which the resize cursor should appear (BorderWidth and PaddedBorderWidth), as explained here: Change Desktop Icon Spacing, Border Width, Window Metrics
but as of right now, for me on build 19045.2251, they no longer appear to have any effect. I did try logging off, and even restarting, and still no change. I recall MS messing about with these when W10 was in its infancy (and even before its release), so had not bothered to look into it lately. If anyone can make those settings work, I'd be interested.

NB In October 2021, spunk gave a link to that same web page.

In Windows 10, what appears to be the "edge" of a window is really not. Windows have a transparent border, with a 1 or 2 pixel line on the inside of that border.
It appears that Microsoft has eliminated the ability of users to change those parameters.