What is up with Vista reverting back to single monitor mode?

i have a newer t60 with vista ultimate and to the right of it i have a dell 24" LCD. i go into display properties to set it to extend the desktop onto the external monitor and it works fine until the computer resumes from screensaver or standby: it reverts back to single monitor.

i googled the issue a bit and it doesnt seem to be a lenovo/thinkpad specific problem. it doesnt seem to be a graphics card problem either (intel mobile 945GM), because there are people with nvidia and ATI cards complaining about the same thing.

I DO have the latest drivers issued by lenovo (installing drivers DL from intel is blocked by the installation software). i have tried the following and none worked:

1) setting windows to use a single monitor then switching the only monitor to be the external display (Fn+F7) then extending the desktop onto the notebook LCD as a secondary display

2) using vista's built in capacity to make the external monitor the primary and the notebook lcd as secondary.

3) using ultramon, but the revert back to single monitor happens at windows level and there is nothing ultramon can do about it

4) using lenovo's presentation management tool to control display settings. it didnt solve the problem but even if it did i wouldnt want to use it. the rest of lenovo's software seems pretty decent but this specific piece sucks - it doesnt let me use WXGA resolutions on the notebook LCD, so everything is resampled thus looking fuzzy.

anybody found a solution for this annoyance?

 

sounds to me like just another windows bug. ugh

maybe you just need to disable screen saver when dual monitoring or something

 

the solution is to disable the task named TMM in the task scheduler. the only disadvantage of not running TMM is that windows does not autodetect when you unplug the external monitor. you need to manually turn it off in display settings. since i am using 2 monitors 95% of the time this is not a problem.