If you have multi monitors, does it seem like every time you reboot all your Fences jump to one screen or go to some other arbitrary screen?

I've love Fences so much I've put up with that behavior for quite some time, always looking for an answer. Today, I came up with one that's far from perfect, it's a been of overhead to set it up but it does work and can done pretty easy even by a novice.

My scenario today was logging into my PC and every Fence was piled up on my left monitor. At first, I would fastidiously move them one by one back to the right monitor. Well, that got old real quick so next I decided to ferret out my Fences back up folder and try and edit the XML file that controls where the fence goes. Kinda' works but gets complicated. So here's what I finally did.

1) I needed to find out what Fences thinks is my right monitor so I made a new fence called "Foobar" on the right monitor so I can see how it's referenced either in the XML file or in the system Registry.

2) You can find the XML file living inside of c:\users\whateveryourusernameis\AppData\Roaming\Stardock\Fences\Backups. Sort the directory by date and the XML file that you just made will come to the top.

3) Open the file with any text editor and now search for "Foobar" or whatever you named that new Fence. The second instance of your search will show something like this...

      <string>39|2872|885|182|93|0|Foobar` |\\.\DISPLAY3` |1920|0|1920|1080|0|0|255|0|` |-1|0|0|0|0|{F8EF1DB0-D915-4BBF-8DC5-7403DD16A86F} |</string>

If you just look it over, you don't need to be a rocket doctor to figure out that my right monitor is now called MONITOR3.

So now you are now the key master so let's go looking for the gate keeper!

4) Open up registry editor... any registry editor... I use RegMagic myself. And go to CURRENT_USER\Software\Stardock\Fences\Groups and you'll find a list of all the current Fences entries and in the data part, you'll see a bunch of kind of familiar looking gobbledygook but now that you have the key, you sly dog you'll be able to see the names of your fences that need to be moved and you'll see a DISPLAY entry that is probably not right.  So simply double click on the 'data' side of the entry and make the change to all the folders that need to be removed. In my case, DISPLAY1 just need to be DISPLAY3.

5) Your changes to the registry happen instantly but Fences won't know about it until your next login. So what I did, is just immediately did a log off without even closing my registry editor or anything and then log back in.

6) Presto! You just moved all your Fences to the correct monitor!!! But hold on there, partner... not done yet. You still don't want to have to do that again. Open up your Fences program and go down to "Layout & Snapping" and under "Layout Snapshots" make a snapshot. In my case, I called it "Right Monitor is MONITOR3". Next time it does this I just restore that backup and I'm in business.

Of course, I'll add new fences but they are pretty stable in their set up right now. And someday, it's going mess up again and may be my right monitor is  MONITOR287 but I have the process to make a quick fix and not have to drag my Fences one by one to the other screen.

Hope this helps you from losing your mind! It's too late for me.

And before you bash Stardock for having a crappy program... it's not their fault. Whenever you use some other screen manager or you plug in another monitor or make virtual desktop, it's pretty much Microsoft deciding how they want to name each screen and the best Fences can do is work with what it was called the last time you logged in.

Thanks!

-- Deadbolt