Windows piles your apps onto one monitor after sleep; a free open-source tray app puts every window back where it was

Microsoft said in that post it had “worked towards mitigating desktop rearrangements” and shipped the change to Windows Insiders on build 21287 and above. Desks with DisplayPort monitors still get rearranged, which is why a one-person open-source project keeps finding users.

PersistentWindows describes itself as a fix for “a long-standing issue in Windows 7, 10, and 11, where windows get repositioned after events such as the system waking up, external monitor connections or disconnections, changes in monitor resolution.” It watches window positions, then “automatically restores the desktop layout, including the taskbar position, to the last matching monitor setup.” Beyond that, you can save layouts on purpose. “Up to 36 snapshots ([0-9a-z]) can be taken for each display configuration,” and the window stacking order comes back too.

Fixes like this tend to outlive the bug reports that prompted them: when an operating system’s own mitigation covers only some hardware, a small utility that just records and replays positions keeps working whatever the cause. PersistentWindows is itself a fork of an older project, which says how long people have needed it.

Microsoft hasn’t said whether the 2021 mitigation reached every Windows 10 and 11 release, or which monitors it still misses.