I keep having the issue where I will be playing and the game for some unknown reason acts like something Alt+Tabbed. I am booted to desktop with the game on my bar. I can click it and hear the game sounds but it refuses to maximize. Makes this game completely unplayable...

I have no FPS issues or anything else while playing, but its not playable when this happens every 3-5 minutes. Just shelving this POS until they maybe fix it.

I've had that problem in many games in the past but not NMS yet thankfully. Are you running any OSD (on screen display) software like RTSS? I think that's what caused it for my in those other games. Otherwise see if another program may be grabbing the focus by shutting them down and seeing if the issue goes away.

One more trick, although I can alt tab fine in fullscreen mode, one time I had the issue you describe where I couldn't simply click the icon to get back in. I went to task manager, right clicked on the process and clicked "bring to front" and that did work for me.

If you run in window mode, you will not have alt-tab issues. I still have it running in the background right now.