Dual monitor setup - tell me about it

I use a nice new LCD as the secondary and an older CRT as the primary. The LCD is bigger and sharper. The CRT does better color rendering for editing color photographs.

>Be prepared to physically swap cables or monitors, but once you’ve set it up, it’ll stay that way.

This isn’t true for me. I can designate the bigger LCD as the primary, but from time to time it will reverse and make it the secondary, or it will make both screens show the same primary view. If I make the CRT the primary, they never spontaneously switch, though the LCD will still spontaneously become a second primary. It will also spontaneously change the resolution of the LCD so that things are rendered as partial pixels (a one pixel thin black line becomes multiple gray pixels wide), and also so the desktop extends beyond its physical edge and I can’t select anything outside that edge. This is all on a Dell running XPP and a stock video card having one DVI and one VGA.

On another system, a laptop running docked with its own LCD as primary and a CRT as secondary, I had a great deal of trouble figuring out that when using one piece of software, the “Mouse Down” windows event isn’t caught if the mouse is on the secondary.

I think it’s all nice but it’s still poorly done, messy and buggy.

The only weirdness or prob I’ve had with multiple screens over the years, dating back to System 7 days circa 1994:

My main computer commonly being a laptop, there is not ONE set of possible external displays I might connect to but a set at the office and a set at my studio and a set at some other office where I do consulting work…

Usually the OS knows one monitor from another; and I could be in Office A where the monitor hooked to this video card is on the left, then go to Office B where the monitor hooked to that same video card is on the right and at a different resolution, and it would just know and use the settings appropriate to the specific hardware.
But back when my older WallStreet PowerBook was my main computer, its built-in TFT was limited to 1024 x 768 and so at the main office where I had an old but huge Sony Trin, I had the Sony Trin as primary monitor. Problem was, at my studio back then the external was also a Sony but a much older 15" Sony, and the desk was too small to have it be the screen directly in front of me (it was on a stand to my left). What would happen was that it would boot, see a Sony and think “aha I know that monitor” — I guess the two Sony monitors used the same digital sig or something — and try to drive it at 1152 x 870 which it did not support, resulting in a primary screen totally black and the built in laptop screen showing mostly blank desktop and no menus. Making it hard to tell the OS “Yo, make the built-in screen the main screen willya?”. So I had to write an AppleScript that would do that when invoked by keystroke.