Issue with apps shutting themselves down.

Hi there,

Apologies if this issue has already been covered elsewhere but I can find no trace of it.

I recently updated from Windows 8 to 8.1 and am mostly very happy with the changes that have been brought in, I am however having one problem that I wasn't before. While using my laptop I tend to have two apps running simultaneously (usually the desktop with radio playing through IE in the background, and Google Chrome for browsing the net in the foreground- Chrome doesn't seem to like the radio website I use) and I used the touchpad left edge swipe to efficiently switch between the two. However since upgrading to 8.1, any apps that are in the background appear to shut themselves down if left there for a certain period of time. This of course means having to reload them from the Start screen each time- an annoyance when I've got so used to a simple touchpad swipe. I also know that it is not a touchpad issue as the apps disappear from the left side bar- the bar itself will not show up as there are no other active apps to be shown.

I've been doing some research into this and read about tombstoning, this appears to be what is happening to me and the app is still running according to the Task Manager. I've also seen something about Windows shutting down unused apps after so long in order to save memory. I don't know if this feature is the culprit or not, but if it's a possibility then is there an option to turn this off, at least for certain apps? Also was this function present in Windows 8? Because I had no such problems with that OS.

Many thanks in advance for any help!

Guy

Further to this, after running a third app recently, it's become clear that it's only the desktop app that closes itself down after a period of time. I still have no clue as to why this is.