How to look for a cause of a OneNote window popping up?

Question

This is an issue I asked Microsoft to answer multiple times here and here without receiving a support that would help.

The issue is making the usage of OneNote a terrible experience. I explain the problem by showing how it manifests by recording my screen and saying what I am doing. You can watch it here, if you are interested, on youtube.

Basically what is happening is this: "I just open a quicknote and while I am typing in a few seconds a wild new main OneNote window appears, stealing focus and letters as I type, throwing them into an unrelated note in between existing words - have to delete them, close the window, continue with the not-so-quick-anymore-note and hope the main window does not jump into my face again (which sometimes actually does - even after closing reappearing again)"

What I would like to know is not really how to solve this problem, because I do not presume anyone would know right away, but - what steps would you take in order to find the cause of this problem in attempt to fix it.

With programming it is easy - you would look for exceptions, logs, read what is happening from there, look for some unusual behaviour. However, this is Microsoft OneNote behaving unexpectedly, not anything I built so I have no idea how to look for the cause - where, if there are any, can I find logs of OneNote; if the cause is actually done by OneNote or something else...

Just to dismiss the obvious solutions

• I did try to reinstall OneNote and it did not help.
• yes, I have a legal and updated version of it
• I even went through an upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 and the behaviour persisted.

Any ideas on where to look at - tools that would generate output on what is a cause of a window opening up, some logs of Microsoft products or any steps I can make to solve this would be appreciated.

note: this is only happening on one (primary) of my computers.

EDIT: When I created a new user in Windows and opened OneNote there, the behaviour was not present. When I moved with my apps there, the problem was back! Gosh I cannot get rid of this..!

Answer 1

Well I spent last four hours with a Windows Tech on a remote control session where he was digging deep in everything not solving it. In the end, however, he isolated it on my user account in windows - when I created a different user, it did not have the problem.

So I (painfully) moved to a new windows user. Hopefully this will not create more issues, than solves. OneNote now works properly again though.

Edit: In the end it came back. I found out that the issue lied in a bugged version of OneNote plugin for ManicTime. Disabling the plugin resolved the issue.