The combinations and permutations of cards/monitors seem endless when you are trying to track down multimonitor problems. I never would have found the cause of that background wash problem if not for an accidental discovery. I had been shutting down my main system, and moving the monitor into another room, adding it into my multimon system, then firing everything back up each time I needed to test an idea. Well, that took about a half-hour for each test. Given that it usually takes at least 500 experiments to isolate a problem, I was despairing of ever being able to get back to any actual creative work.
Then one night at about 2 a.m., I negelected to shut down the multimon system before taking the main monitor back to my computer room. The second monitor was still on, and it's the one which exhibited the "fish-trails" problem. This freed me to work continuously on my main machine, simply shuttling a thumbdrive back and forth to try experiments without ever shutting anything down. After about 10 hours of this, I finally tracked down the culprit (setting the size of a polygon so large that the second display choked on it and wouldn't display it at all).
|