the darkness problem can be solved by going into settings, and upping your brightness (it might be called gamma, not sure)
i have a similar problem with the mouse pointer randomly appearing though, and its annoying, because you have to hit esc and then resume to get the cursor to go away (or at least i have to do that)
i don't have the problem with random minimizing though. are you sure you dont have another program that is not recognizing it as a game, and innterupting it, and causing it to minimize the game?