Game has keyboard input lag OR freezes my webbrowsers.

Hi everyone!

First of all I'd like to say I'm loving the game!
I am having some weird issues with it however...

I recently started playing it again, and it was working fine.
The next day however, I had some strange input lag on my keyboard.
Every button I pressed took over half a second before the game registered it.
This was only on my keyboard, my mouse & Xbox controller were working fine.

I temporarily solved by reinstalling the game,
but the day after that the problem returned...
And reinstalling it didn't fix it anymore.

What did fix this keyboard input lag issue was running the game as an administrator.
But since then a different problem has popped up:
Whenever I'm playing the game, all of my web browsers (I've tried this with chrome and Internet explorer) completely freeze.
Any youtube or netflix video (or spotify song, even moving gifs) that's playing stops until I alt tab back out of the game, and something else receives focus.
When I return to the game, the browsers freeze again.
(small point: If I go from the game straight to focus a browser, the browser also remains frozen, something else needs to receive focus first. After that the browser continues as if nothing happens)

Stardew Valley's the only game I have that has this issue, I've tried meddling with steam overlay and verifying game cache etc... to no avail. I'm running it on windows 8.1 if that helps.

Has anyone ever experienced anything similar or an idea of what might fix this completely?

Best regards,
Rippers

 

Hi everyone!

Small update,
I've been doing some more testing...

So it appears there are two problems at work for me:
1. If I run the game normally, I'm experiencing input lag on my keyboard, and only my keyboard. It takes about half a second for key presses to register in game.
Running the game as administrator fixes this.

2. The problem I mentioned before then, where chrome & Internet Explorer are frozen while the game has focus happens regardless of whether or not I run the game as administrator.
However: small update, I've tried it with VLC media player and this is paused/frozen too while the game has focus.
Just now I was even copying some files from one hard drive to another using TeraCopy, and even this was actually paused while playing the game!
It actually paused copying the files while Stardew Valley had focus, once I alt tabbed out, it instantly continued as if nothing happened.

It's like the game freezes other threads or something...

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this?

Best regards,
Rippers