I was fed up with appalling performance on my new PC (Asus P8Z77-V LK, i5 3570k, HD7850OC, 8Gb DDR3), so I played around with the graphical settings. I finally happened to check the Windowed mode in the options, but instead of the game running in a window it was still full screen - only now all the jerkiness was gone and I could enjoy smooth frame rates. Anyone else had similar experience?
It is simply windowed fullscreen because your sim res matched the desktop. If you run a lower res, it won't be fullscreen anymore. Yes, it probably means something else on your system was affecting running of rF2, stealing focus perhaps.