Due to the longish load times in the beta, I've played with switching tasks (Alt + Tab out) while waiting for a game to load. I notice that when the game is full-screen, this seems to suspend the process of the game loading. I then wait while the game loads where it left off before I switched out. To work around this, I find myself going Alt+Enter to Windowed mode, where the game seems to process correctly in the background while I'm doing other stuff.

 

Other times, I've switched back to PoE while loading a game (full screen) to find the screen completely black, or frozen on "Game paused" with my character's portraits offscreen. But the HDD light on my machine is unlit, and I can press Esc and hear the sound of the game's Options dialog being brought up. It's as though the game loaded but the screen isn't being redrawn, or a black overlay from the load screen remains in place.  I can switch to Windowed mode (Alt + Enter) to restore the graphics.

Edited October 14, 201411 yr by PrimeHydra

Also: When attempting to switch back to PoE after alt+tabbing out during a full-screen-mode game load, the app may not respond for a few minutes. Eventually the screen does come back, but it appears to the user as though they've broken it  It would be great if there were some way to make full-screen mode play as well with task switching as windowed mode does.