cocoaforge

I don't know if this is centered on Adium, or if it's even just me, but I've found that Adium will often steal the focus from whatever window I might be working on. Here are some examples:

Finder could be the active app at the moment, with iTunes clearly sitting above Adium. If I click on iTunes to make it the active window, it becomes active for a split second, then instead Adium becomes active.

I'm throwing some stuff in the trash that needs my admin password, I put my password in and press enter, it goes to the trash, and Adium pops up, stealing focus from Finder.

This is just a couple examples, and it gives you an idea. It's incredibly annoying, especially considering that with OS X, you need to click an app first for it to become active, then again to do something with. So everytime Adium steals the focus, I have to click on what I want twice just to get back to what I was doing. Mulitply this times 100-200 times a day, and it starts getting really annoying.

I can say that it's not just you as I encountered something very similar. On my machine at home, after performing some tasks (just as you did) Mail would be brought to the front, even though it was hidden. I'd hide it again, go do something else, and it would pop right back up. There were no password prompts up or anything else from Mail that required attention.

I blew it off as something really weird as it only happened for that one chunk of time; hadn't before and hasn't since.

But unlike your situation, it wasn't Adium taking precedence. Adium was running at the time but I'm unsure if that's just a coincidence.

Turns out it's an OS X bug. I switched from Adium and started using iChat instead, and iChat started doing the exact same thing. So it looks like the only reason I thought it was Adium was cause I always have Adium open.