Postby compunoob » 06 Jan 2014 23:59
I had the same issue and could not fix it (until ... see at bottom).
And I am puzzled by Remi's response in that it does not seem to fit the symptoms, at least it certainly didn't fit mine which were basically (and possibly totally) the same as for SteamPunk Girl, but I will add one thing, the window was the full size of the screen and NO, this was NOT in vlc-full-screen-mode. You could see the VLC top menu items, but not the bar above it that says "VLC media player", allows you to re-size the window and has the "-" (i.e. minimize), box (i.e. toggle Window's Full Screen ... as opposed to VLC Full Screen) & "X" (i.e. kill window). So I was stuck with a full sized VLC that I had to alt+tab to get to other programs. This was not a terrible thing and would even be a nice option... if you could choose to get out of it.
For completeness, I was using
vlc-2.0.7-win32.exe
Windows Vista Home Premium SP2 64-bit
Toshiba Satellite A305
BTW, I used the "simple" fix of un-installing (including dumping the preferences) it and installing the new version 2.1.2 ... problem solved.