Solved multi monitor display oddities - system stopped working

[rst]

Hello,
I have a windows 7 professional, 64 bit system.
ATI Radeon HD3650 Video card driver version 8.620.0.0 from ATI, dated 5/15/2009.
I have an LCD TV, located in another room, hooked up to the HDMI port, and a monitor hooked up to the DVI port. For whatever reason, the tv has always been detected as monitor 1. In normal use, the monitor is used for the computer, with the desktop icons and the task bar, and the tv is used to play movies.
The system has been in place, and operating fine for well over a year. There have been no OS updates in the last week or two, no driver updates for much longer than that.
I use the win-p keyboard shortcut to switch back and forth between projector (standard monitor) and extend.
I went to start a movie tonight, and switched the display from projector (tv is detected as monitor 1) to extend and the monitor became the secondary display, and the tv became the primary display.
To rephrase:
1) normally the monitor is the primary display, and always has the task bar and desktop icons, the tv is turned on as desired, in extend mode, for playing movies and will only show the wallpaper if no program window is open.
2) today, the monitor shows exactly what I expect, until I change to extend mode, at which time the TV shows the desktop icons and task bar, and the monitor shows only the wallpaper.
I have checked all the settings under
Control panel > Display > Screen resolution
and all settings appear unchanged. I'm not even sure what to try next.
If I have left out any relevant details, just ask.
Any suggestions or insight would be very much appreciated.
Thanks,
Ray

 

[Night Hawk]

Hello rst Welcome to the Seven Forums!

When running a player or even the software viewer for the tv tuner/capture card here and moving it over from the primary display to the second with the extended desktop the full screen playback is still only seen on the primary.

Here I use the UltraMon program for dusl display where you have the option to switch which monitor or in your case tv or monitor will be the primary with a right click and check off the monitor 1 or monitor 2 item in the right click menu's Set Primary option for setting which will be the default display.

UltraMon, DisplayFusion, and others are 3rd party help for things like that or offering a Smart type task bar extension over to the second monitor when extending the desktop. For full screen playback there you would temporary set the primary for the tv when going to watch anything full screen.

 

[rst]

Just in case anybody finds this in the future, the problems continued to get worse to the point where the monitor would not show anything. I ended up replacing the video card. Now everything works as it always did. I didn't bother with any expensive 3rd party software to fix something that always worked.