Does this happen with all games? What version of dosbox are you using?
And does the keyboard still respond (game-wise) when this happens?

Hello wd, thanks for your interest!

I'm using DOSBox version 0.63 (just downloaded the latest one there was), I haven't yet tried earlier versions.

So far, my problem has come up with all the games I've tested, which are:

Challenge of the Five Realms
Darklands
EcoQuest
Faery Tale Adventure 2
Goblins 1, 2 & 3
Monkey Island 1
Ringworld
Settlers 2
Simon the Sorcerer 1 & 2
Ultima Underworld 1 & 2
X-Com 2

Keyboard always seems to work fine, both in window and fullscreen modes. Somehow, I don't think this is a game-specific problem...

Could there be a way to resize the DOSBox window so that it occupies the whole screen (or almost)? For lack of true fullscreen mode, that'd be the second best thing for me.

I'll be very grateful for any help provided on this subject.

As it seems to happen with different configurations and different
SDL-programs, you could try to replace the sdl.dll (and others)
by older/newer ones (www.libsdl.org), and/or update your graphics
drivers (mouse driver maybe too, did you try a different mouse,
like a usb-mouse?)

> so that it occupies the whole screen (or almost)?

You can try the scalers/scaler parameters (look into dosbox.conf,
somewhere at the top), don't know if it's possible to stretch it
that large though.

Using the new CVS builds, isn't there "windowresolution" now? That should enlarge the window to any size you like. You might need to change the "output" setting as well for it to work.

Thank you very much for your suggestions. I'll get to work on implementing them to see what happens, and if I get to solve the problem I'll make sure to post the solution here, as I'm sure there can be somebody else with the same problem out there.

I was able to stretch the window to the full width of my screen (though not full heigth) setting output=ddraw and hwscale=1.24 (my desktop resolution is set to 800x600).

On a side note, I had the opportunity to test DOSBox on a Packard Bell laptop with Windows XP, and all seemed to work well (I copied all files from my computer to that one). Maybe this is a Windows ME-specific problem?