If you’re like me and you have to use Vista (sorry) you might be running into an annoyance. If you’re running multiple monitors - might happen on singles, don’t know - when you wake the system up, unlock it, or just basically log in the screen(s) will tend to blank out and rebuild themselves. This has the annoying effect of (at least for me) shoving everything I had on my external monitor back onto the main monitor. This forces me to find all the windows I’d had on the other monitor and shuffle them back over.

After weeks of doing this I just gave up as it wasted lots of time and eventually I had a second monitor that was never used. Vista just oozes fail. Anywho. I tracked down the solution and here it is for your enjoyment.

Bring up the Task Scheduler (found under Administrative Tools). Go down the Task scheduler tree on the left to Task Scheduler -> TaskScheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows -> MobilePC. There you’ll find TMM. Go ahead and disable that. This supposedly allows windows to detect and configure newly added monitors on the fly. It frankly hasn’t worked properly for me in the past - I run an external as a main monitor on my setup and when I slept my laptop and took it home it still thought the main was there and so displayed the menu bar and all on some non-existent monitor. DOH!

Anywho, disable this task. And then remember to the Task Scheduler Summary (Task Scheduler in the tree on the left) and select “Display All Running Tasks”. Find TMM, it’ll be running, it was for me. And then stop it.

Since then I’ve had no problems with my screen cleaning up all my windows and sweeping them away. This is also supposed to keep you refresh rates and resolutions from being reset. Though I only had that happen once or twice.

Good luck with your further pains of working with Vista. And remember, you’re not alone. Though, in a perfect world…