Entrapment bug in 8, fixed in 10?

[zhangm Supervisor]

I ran into this issue on 8 today. Curious if this sort of thing happens in current builds of 10. Requires two or more displays.

To reproduce:

Open Task Manager. Move it to the secondary display. Close it so that this position is remembered. You can check by invoking it again.

Have the desktop open on your primary display, and have a full screen Metro app open on the secondary (I had News). On the primary display, Shift + right-click the taskbar and select Exit explorer. Wait a second.

What I see:

The desktop on primary is replaced with a solid color after a brief pause. No inputs are accepted. The full screen app window controls on secondary cease to respond. The app cannot be closed by Alt + F4, pulling down from the top, made to snap or switch displays. If you try and invoke Task Manager to restart the Explorer process, the window opens on the secondary display, behind the full screen app. It cannot be accessed or made to move to the primary display. Locking the computer and unlocking isn't effective at working around this issue. I wasn't able to get any output from Task Manager after Alt + Tabbing to that window and blindly inputting commands.

One way to restart Explorer is to use the keyboard shortcut to invoke Sticky Keys (hammer Shift five times or press the right Shift key for longer than eight seconds). The dialog that appears can be used to access the Control Panel, and that enables you to open a command prompt from which you can launch explorer.exe. Maybe there are additional workarounds.

Is this behavior different on 10?

[HawkMan]

Not sure about that specifically, but what I miss from earlier versions of windows that's missing in 8 and 10 is the ability to get to the move window controls by right clicking the task bar or even using the dropdown menu button, as sometime for some weird reason, some windows decide that they want to live off screen unless they're maximised. 

[notchinese]

I don't have multiple monitors, but "full screen" and desktop don't really live hand in hand on W10. You can maximize apps but for the most part they are no different than a Win32 app. A few do have full screen, such as netflix. And if you are in tablet mode I don't think you really have free reign over the desktop. You can run any desktop app but I don't think you can just use the desktop like it is its own special environment.

[zhangm Supervisor]

I don't have multiple monitors, but "full screen" and desktop don't really live hand in hand on W10. You can maximize apps but for the most part they are no different than a Win32 app.

Well, I guess the question then is whether the window control functions require explorer.exe to be running. It's clear that W32 apps on 8 do not have such a requirement where as the Metro apps do. Perhaps they've decided to make things different.

Not that I have any expectation that this issue occurs regularly. Still, it can lead to a real browning-the-pants moment if you haven't been frequently saving things in certain documents...

[statm1]

Not sure about that specifically, but what I miss from earlier versions of windows that's missing in 8 and 10 is the ability to get to the move window controls by right clicking the task bar or even using the dropdown menu button, as sometime for some weird reason, some windows decide that they want to live off screen unless they're maximised. 

 

The window move keyboard shortcuts are in Win8 and are still in Win10.. Just use ctrl + win key + left or right to move the active window between multiple monitors. Since my secondary monitor is my tv, sometimes there is a window on my tv that I want while I am watching tv so instead of having to change my input I just use the shortcut to move the window onto the primary monitor so I can use it. But that assumes you have your taskbar set to include icons from all open apps/windows from secondary and tertiary monitors on your primary monitor's taskbar. That way you have access to make a specific window that you can't see active.

[Preppy Veteran]

When I tried this just now, yes, that behavior is different.  The app bar works fine and you can also alt-tab to Task Manager cleanly.