Tf2 freezes/crashes when I minimize

For some reason my game always freezes or crashes when I alt tab into windows. I am playing at 1920 x 1200. At first I thought maybe it was my video card, but it doesn't seem to happen with any other games. I read somewhere that it is registry issues but I am not sure.

TF2 has been giving me NOTHING but problems for the past week or so, alt-tabbing causes some type of memory leak and the textures fail to load and I keep suffering from general lockups and stuttering (Not to mention severe latency)

All other games I own work just fine...I'll post a pic of what happened to me recently when I get to my home computer.

To fix your alt-tab problems play in borderless windowed mode.

Add the following to your TF2 launch options: -window -noborder

This looks exactly like fullscreen but it alt+tabs very quickly and shouldn't crash

Yeah I still can't figure out what the hell happened here - take a look at this (Happend after I alt-tabbed)

Well Im glad its not just me =), thanks for the tips leviathan, I will give that window mode a try. Yea tf2 has some memory leak issues.... I also have a spray issue where it won't let me pick a spray, but that's another story.

^For me when I alt tab, the music first starts to stutter, 25% of the time it eventually fixes itself and allows me in game. The other 75% it just crashes and I have to ctrl-alt-del to force close tf2.

Have you tried enabling the console and typing:

This generally will bring back any "invisible" enemies and broken objects and terrain. When you alt + tab in TF2 the game stops on your end. TF2 being a multiplayer game, does not stop for the other players. When you come back into the game after a short or long period of time, your game client tries to bring you back up to speed (check your processes while in TF2 and while out of it). Then you become caught in a loop with torn graphics and sluggish speed.

Hmm I'll give that a shot - thanks!

I also noticed my GTX285 was reaching 95c earlier today (Its about 95f degrees here where I live, I had to crank up RivaTuner fan to 100% Fixed)

2 gigs of ram makes it a terrible event every time you alt tab too. I pulled out all my dims except for 2 gigs and tried alt tabbing. I won;t be doing that again... lol