Stop Vista from messing up your display(s)

Have you noticed that whenever your Vista machine (especially laptops) resume from standby, hibernate or just plain screensaver and you have Windows lock enabled, your screen will flash at least once or twice? And if you are like me, running on multi display, Vista will try to reconfigure both displays for some reason but usually ends up messing up both displays? In my case, my laptop display's resolution gets dropped to 800x600 (and in the process messing up all my windows layout) and sometimes I get blank screens on both displays (after which I had to hard reset my PC to recover and lose all my unsaved work in the process.. geez.. thanks Microsoft).

It took me awhile to track down the problem but I finally managed to pinpoint the root cause. There is a new component in Vista called "Microsoft Transient Multi-Monitor Manager" that manages the switching of displays. By default, it is configured to run everytime a user is logged on (apparently, unlocking your desktop is considered as such).

To solve the problem, follow the steps below to disable it.

1. Open up Computer Management window. i.e right click on Computer in the Start menu and select Manage.
2. Expand System Tools -> Task Scheduler -> Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows and click on MobilePC.
3. In the top middle pane, right click on the item named TMM and select Disable.
4. Reboot your PC.