I'll upload a new log tonight.

In the meantime, I've discovered something else -- when Fences get messed up/distorted, the desktop right-click menu also gets changed.

This is the desktop right-click menu under normal working conditions:

And when Fenches have becomes messed up, the desktop right-click menu looks like this:

So there's definitely something weird going on.

@Wild4fire, thanks for the report. Some good news! I'm noticing a very interesting oddity in this round of logs – and one that we're able to do something about.

Technicals:
When your monitor goes to sleep, it's doing something very interesting in that (1) it's disappearing altogether (system reports 0 physical monitors with 1 virtual monitor @ 1024 x 768) (2) the IDs of that 1024 x 768 aren't matching up between Explorer.exe and Fences.exe.

I've implemented a workaround which should both hopefully fix your problem and not impact other users negatively.

Will post a copy tomorrow for you to test, and with any luck we'll see it is fixed!

More soon and thanks again.

Thanks for all your efforts, I'm curious if that updated version of Fences will fix things.

Still, the question remains why Windows is behaving like this. It didn't use to do so under 23H2 so I'm assuming it's something introduced with 24H2.

Thanks for all your hard work, it's much appreciated!

I think we'll have an answer tomorrow morning when I wake up and check my e-mail. If I turn the display on and everything is still fine, it would then appear it has been fixed. If not, I'll make sure to gather some extra logging for you guys.

Wooo! Fingers crossed! Will await further confirmation but that's great news so far!

If it ends up being fixed, upload a report one last time so I can scope it and verify everything looks good under the hood, beyond it just empirically working. But yup I'm hoping this one is a wrap. Thanks again for your help resolving.

Everything's still OK over here, so I think it's safe to assume the issue has been fixed. As requested, I've just uploaded a report so you can wrap things up.

And, again, many thanks for the excellent support getting this issue resolved!

No, thank *you*! I'm glad you guys offer support that's actually good, it's not always like that with software companies.

Ok noted. Will keep an eye out for it.

Roger. Feel free to submit right after an incident and submit a few reports 👍 No harm done by sending too many

Yup agreed (re old vs new Windows install)

Unique, I guess sorta the proof is in the pudding ha. If it were not unique, would have seen this and address and/or firefighting elsewhere on the message boards.

I'm sure it's impacting others though, who just aren't making their way here for support. So am looking forward to getting resolved in full. 🙏 

Unsure what is "still breaking" now per se, but the original "fix" involved the fact that Windows was basically telling two different processes two different things about the monitor state of the system. The in-explorer and out-of-explorer processes that manage this stuff were giving back different results for the same function call, for when your system went to zero monitors. This is an extremely common action (monitor going to sleep or turned off etc → zero monitors), so if this were a common thing, we'd be blowin up with non-working copies 😵‍💫. Worked around it by having the in-explorer piece pass it's knowledge to the out-of-explorer piece so that both sides would be in agreement. Glad we worked around that piece of it, but looking forward to seeing what else is still going on.

Unlikely. That setting doesn't have any impact on the desktop itself (only new standalone explorer windows), and lots and lots of users using that as well. So I wouldn't worry about that one!

I'd say that just each time you see the problem come about, send a report right away, and I can see if something pops out. 🙏

All,

The Fences beta has been updated to 5.86.  For details, please see:

https://forums.stardock.com/531354/get;3946718

As always, thank you for your time, feedback, and support.

Sean Drohan
Stardock Product Lifecycle Manager

No, it hasn't popped up again. So whatever caused the one or two times since your fix, it's not something that occurs regularly. For now, I'll disable logging in Fences. Should the issue rear its ugly head again I'll start logging again.