Yeah, I hate it when games can't stand being minimised. It's just laziness on the part of the game's makers mostly, it's quite possible to make a game fully compatable with an operating system, it just requires playtesting on a varied number of computers, runnig different OS configurations.
I remember being impressed by the GTA games when I reinstalled Vice City recently; you can minimise the game, and then come back to it with a minimum of effort. Also, the game automatically pauses upon minimisation, whether by interuption by a firewall or some other program, or by accidentally hitting the windows key. This is a game which had the proper effort put into it by it's makers (hence the year sepearating the consoel and PC releases), shows that such issues are only possible to correct with a large input of resources that most developers simply cannot afford to put in.
And I have to say, I do tend to unplug my internet and deactivate my firewall/virus scanner when playing a game; but that's mostly because my computer is showing signs of its age and I need all the free memory I can get, than through fear of minimisation.
Still, this problem is hardly new, I've had problems with minimsation since I first started gaming. It's the way applications that force things to minimise have become widespread that makes this more of a problem, and it's them that really annoy me about software today. Whether it's the popup blockers that pop up to tell you that they've just blocked a popup or the virus scan that start's automatically every week in the middle of the evening, and that takes 10 minutes to stop because it's using up all the of system resources available to it. Also programs like quicktime and steam that start when you turn your computer on so you have to spend the first 10 minutes after you've turned your computer on closing them all, and are only possible to kill by rottling around in msconfig, trying to figure out which arbitrary jumble of letters refers to which program. Then there's things like realsched and jusched that constantly run, hidden from you except deep with the Task Manager, who exist only to communicate with their motherships, to make sure that you instantly know about the next useless update of their terrible program... grrrrr...
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