I cannot say I've ever seen this problem & I've been using dual monitors for
years, with various cards.
I'd suggest that you are not using the dual monitor support/drivers supplied
with your video card, but are instead using MS generic drivers.

"james" wrote in message
...
Many video card with with two outputs have a bad habbit of disabling one
of the output if the attached monitor is off during boot. I use one
monitor most of the time and want to use two occasionally. To have to turn
on both during boot is a pain.

In win XP, this problem can sometimes be overcome by choosing generic SVGA
instead of PnP monitor.

Now, I'm running vista and this trick doesn't work. I'm using an old
Geforce4 440 MX card with microsoft driver.

Is there another solution to this problem?
If I buy a new card (also with 2 outputs), is there some card that comes
without this problem?

Or, is there a fake monitor simulator that I can plug in the video port
between my monitor and the computer so it thinks the monitor is on?