KVM switch + Windows 7 creates monitor switching nightmare

I am still experimenting to see if this works 100% of the time but have only switched back and forth between two boxes like 5 or 6 times so far. My specs are as follows: One box has Windows 7 with a Nvidia GeForceGTX 460 Graphics card One Box with Windows XP Pro running a Nvidia card that is one maybe two generations back from the GTX. Iogear DVI Two-Port KVM switch that will switch mouse, video, keyboad, and sound. I was reading the Iogear KVM manual and was trying to see if there was a difference between the hard switching with buttons on the front of KVM and "soft" switching using the keyboad hotkeys. There are a couple of different "levels" of switching with mine. One quick push of the button will apparently switch the video and mouse/keyboard but leave the speakers. When you push and hold for 2 seconds it forces all "focus" to shift to the other PC. Hmmm, so I tried it. Now when I press and hold the switching button for whichever comp I want to switch to for 2 seconds it switches and leaves it at the resolution I had it at and doesn't reset it (so far). Now as frustrating as this has been so far I am going to chalk it up as coincidence or luck and it should be back to frustrating the **** out of me before the evening is out. If it starts doing it again I did find how to upgrade my firmware in my switch and that will be next trial.

This is my current setup:

 8 Servers connected to an 8 port Iogear kvm Switch to a single monitor.

All servers have different operating systems and never had a problem until I updated one of the servers to Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit edition. Thats when the display problems began. Sometimes the screen would go and never come back, had to restart the server in order to get the display back. So I followed a suggestion from another forum where the solution was to rip the #12 pin out of the vga cable from the monitor or the vga extension cable. I did, and guess what, it worked like a charm. No more problems, don't have to buy a new kvm or uninstall win7. Link below to where I got the info.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itprogeneral/thread/8a9b5aa7-fe33-4e6d-b39b-8ac80a21fdc2

If installing ZBar works for the people who have said it helps, that's great, but I can't explain why.

I wrote the app, and was directed to this thread by one of the users.  ZBar reacts to the WM_DISPLAYCHANGE message broadcast by Windows, waits two seconds (for monitors to "settle down"), and then calls EnumDisplayMonitors() to get the updated information.

It then goes on to ask about monitor working areas, but does nothing to instruct Windows to redetect, discover or update any information.  If it fixes a problem some people are seeing, I can assure you it's entirely accidentally!

Tom

I read about Zbar two weeks ago in http://onsoftware.softonic.com/50-mejores-utilidades-pequenas . I thought that Zbar could fix the problem (how would win7 handle a taskbar double the size of the active monitor?) but didn't give it a try.

When I read your tip, I immediately installed it and end of the problem. As many of the users have pointed out here, it is a software issue: Zbar forces indeed a "re-detection" of the monitors, I can still listen to the hardware connect/disconnect sounds, but this is far much better than buying new hardware.

Thanks again :-)

You're Welcome (Zbar Optimist)

It seems to me that it worked, but I couldn't believe it was that simple after the numerous posts that I've read over this subject.

That is why I chose to at least leave a new possibility for people to try on somebody's thread, and this thread at least had a fairly recent posting date.

Hopefully Windows Update won't set us back a step.

I only found Zbar by reading through a lot of wikipedia monitor pages.

Zbar is simple and nice.   Right click on the zbar for the task manager.

SLG