Dual monitors glitch and collapse all open programs into 1 monitor 2 19.5 K2

a2021cer01user

I was able to get everything setup and the new monitors to be on multiple display. I can work and have the 2 monitors functioning just fine and then after about 20 minutes, the screen will freeze for about 3 seconds and all of my programs will collapse onto one monitor. If I move the programs back to the 2 monitors, another 20 minutes later it will do the same thing. This goes on over and over throughout the day. I'm using all acer products so I'm baffled as to what is happening. I've checked the drivers on the monitors and it says they have the most recent drivers. Oddly enough one monitor has a driver from April 2020 and the other monitor has a driver from September 2020, even though I just purchased these at the exact same time. I have 2 19.5 K2 acer monitors and an acer USB Type-C Dock II station that are connected using 2 brand new HDMI cables, and an acer laptop too. Any idea if this is fixable?

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billsey

Swap the two monitor to see if the glitch follows the monitor or the port. It sounds like the glitch is a loss of connection, so the system momentarily finds only one monitor connected, hence the movement of everything to just the one.

a2021cer01user

When I’ve swapped monitors, it follows whatever monitor is the primary monitor. So the secondary monitor will collapse all the programs onto whichever one I have designated as the primary.

billsey

So if you make monitor #2 in the Display Settings the primary it also switched the glitch, even without moving the monitors between ports?

a2021cer01user

Yes. If I switch the primary using only the display settings, the issue still happens. So to be clear, if I only adjust the settings and swap the monitors from being primary to secondary, the glitching issue will still happen and all of the open programs will collapse onto the new monitor that have designated as primary. If I then switch it back by changing the display settings, then the programs will collapse onto the other monitor that I have now designated as primary. On a separate note, if I instead keep the settings the same but physically swap the ports, the same thing will happen. The programs will now collapse onto the monitor that is listed as the primary.

billsey

OK, so both monitors seem to be going to sleep, but when they wake they wake separately. That causes the desktop to initialize while only one monitor is awake... The problem is they are going to sleep when they shouldn't, causing the glitch. Or it's not sleep at all, but the graphics chip shutting one monitor down periodically. We know that it's not related to the monitor hardware because you can move it from one monitor to another. So we need to look for glitches on the computer side of things. It might be in the display drivers, it might be in Windows itself. Does Event Viewer capture any data when the glitch happens? You can try removing the GPU drivers, using the 'remove files' option if available, then rebooting and reinstalling them. You can also verify you are either running the latest version on the support website or the latest version from the GPU manufacturer.

a2021cer01user

I checked my event viewer and it says that every time I am having this issue, it reports it as critical using error codes 10110 and 10111. The source is DriverFrameworks-Usermode. The error code 10110 says, "A problem has occurred with one or more user-mode drivers and the hosting process has been terminated." and error code 10111 says, "The device Acer Dock Video (location 0003.0000.0003.005.003.000.000.000.000) is offline due to a user-mode driver crash." This makes me think it is a driver issue. I'm just not sure which driver is the issue and how I can uninstall and then make sure to download the right driver.