This may come in handy for those of you out there who use a laptop and frequently switch between standalone usage (single LCD display) to docked (dual-monitor) to standalone w/projector (dual-monitor) by going standby and/or undocking.

In general, Windows XP and the Dell Latitude equipment is very good about maintaining stability when docking and undocking. However, one annoying “feature” is when I’ve been using dual monitor for a while and then go to standalone/single and the application is still “displayed” on a phantom second monitor, or if the application “remembers” somehow to display on the second monitor.

When this happens to you, it acts like this — say you launch Word, and you see the Word task bar object down in the start bar, but when you click on it, it doesn’t come into focus on your screen. However, if you have window automations turned on (I think they’re default), you can actually see the window zooming and opening up for a quick second as it displays it on the 2nd monitor, which doesn’t exist. This happens a lot with error dialog boxes, say from Putty or something. IE, when I undock from a dual monitor setup and I have Putty on the 2nd monitor, Putty displays this “ok” dialog box when it loses network connectivity. Well, this “ok” dialog is on the phantom second monitor, so you can’t seem to close it from the start bar, and when you try to right-click on the task bar item it just does nothing. Very annoying.

So what you do is make the application have focus (ie, click on it in the task bar so that it’s looks like it
s ‘pressed’ like a button…) and do what it wants. In the case of Putty, it’s simply pressing Enter. However, most of the time, you don’t want to close the app, you just want it to display on the main monitor. So you can right-click on the item in the task bar and select “Move”. Then just hold down the right arrow key on the keyboard until it shows up, then press Enter. Now you can move the window around, double-click on the title bar to have it maximize on the primary monitor, or use it however you want.

I know most Office programs (Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, etc) sometimes “remember” what screen they were on last, but it’s inconsistent and I can’t tell when it does remember and when it doesn’t. But hopefully this tip helps someone out someday.