Help - DesktopWorkArea Setting

[ZaLiTH]

Greetings...

I may be new to the Rainmeter forums, but I have been using Rainmeter on and off since version 0.8 a few years back, so I am reasonably well versed in how everything works... I've hit a small problem lately though, I started using Rainmeter again recently on my work PC to display RSS feeds, but I'm having difficulty with the "DesktopWorkArea" setting.

I'm running a dual monitor setup on Windows XP Pro SP3 32-bit, using Rainmeter 1.3 Beta rev 529. In the Rainmeter (beta) Help, I did see the following note regarding this setting:

Note that moving the taskbar will reset the workarea to Windows' default, as will changing screen resolution. If you have multiple monitors, you can set the DesktopWorkArea for a specific monitor by adding @ and the number of the monitor to the end of DesktopWorkArea. DesktopWorkArea= or DesktopWorkArea@0= is the primary monitor, and DesktopWorkArea@1-@xx is a specific monitor.

And I've added the following lines to my Rainmeter.ini file under the "[Rainmeter]" tag:

Code: Select all

DesktopWorkArea@0=0,30,1280,994
DesktopWorkArea@1=0,30,1280,994

But it keeps resetting my desktop work space for my secondary monitor from time to time, the only way I can duplicate this regularly is to open and then close Winamp (currently using version 5.581). It's fine when Winamp opens, but as soon as I cose it, my secondary monitor workspace resets to default.

This doesn't change anything in the Rainmeter.ini file, and selecting "Refresh All" brings back my workspace size, but I can't find any way to get around this... Did I make a mistake with the settings I added? Or is this a compatibility issue...?

[ZaLiTH]

Has nobody got any ideas here...? It's happening on two different computers, one on XP Pro x86 with the 32-bit Rainmeter and the other on Windows 7 x64 with the 64-bit Rainmeter.

[JamesAC]

This is a known issue, caused by the way the work area is set. Whenever the resolution of your screen is changed or updated. My guess would be that winamp is causing the resolution to update, resetting the DWA setting in Rainmeter. I don't know of any solution at the moment except to "refresh all" when it changes.

[ZaLiTH]

This is a known issue, caused by the way the work area is set. Whenever the resolution of your screen is changed or updated. My guess would be that winamp is causing the resolution to update, resetting the DWA setting in Rainmeter. I don't know of any solution at the moment except to "refresh all" when it changes.

Hi James, thanks for the info.. I did end up adding a little button that refreshes all configs just until I could figure out what it was, but now at least I know it's not because of something I did wrong in my setup.

[dragonmage]

A little late here, sorry. In my personal testing this only occurred if Winamp is set to minimize to the systray. I think what is happening is that when WA is set to do that it sends a message to Windows to refresh the system when it is closed, probably to be sure it gets rid of the WA icon in the systray.

[ZaLiTH]

A little late here, sorry. In my personal testing this only occurred if Winamp is set to minimize to the systray. I think what is happening is that when WA is set to do that it sends a message to Windows to refresh the system when it is closed, probably to be sure it gets rid of the WA icon in the systray.

While that does make sense, I think there's a bit more to it than that... Although I do generally have my Winamp set to only show the systray icon, even when I select to only use the taskbar button instead, it behaves exactly the same way.

It's not too serious though, I'm not using RainMeter at work anymore. Still using it at home though, but there I can set my desktop workspace size with my shell (mostly LiteStep, but I also use Emerge Desktop sometimes).