Ah, I see. That is indeed odd. Maybe one of the monitors is dropping out or sleeping? Are they daisy chained? Same connection type or different? Onboard or GPU connected? Maybe the GPU PCIe interface is going into some kind of power saving mode? I do tech support a fair bit so if there’s any commonalities, hypotheses, or coincidences you can think of that might help me figure this out if I come across it, please let me know.

The failure mode for the shortcut I referenced above is that the screen is all black but you do still have a mouse cursor.

Maybe try the shortcut I linked next time you experience this issue just to see if it works for you and/or on other devices which don’t have your particular fix?

It's not a driver or hardware issue. Please concentrate more closely on the problem as I describe it, not as you believe it to be.

It happens with many different kinds of monitors, with many different kinds of docking stations, and 3 different laptops. I started encountering the problem on Windows 10, and continue to encounter the problem on Windows 11.

I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the fact that I change a lot of the taskbar's defaults. It's probably a setting that most Microsoft Windows engineers don't use, and an unusual enough corner case that either Microsoft Windows engineers haven't seen it, or are aware of the issue but haven't prioritized it.

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BTW: A lot of Explorer problems are not hardware related. Many software packages install Explorer plugins that crash Explorer or make it unresponsive. Ever have the right-click menu take forever to display? That's most likely a 3rd party plugin blocked on a network or filesystem call.

(I shipped a plugin and took care to architect the application so it wouldn't block Explorer.)