The short answer to this is: if at all possible, use the primary monitor for the SSP control window.  Or to put it another way, have a compelling reason to actually make your primary monitor the display window.

Some time ago (that is, several years), there were compelling reasons to use your primary monitor for your display window.  One reason was that, at the time, PowerPoint wouldn’t display in the secondary monitor.  Even though SSP properly supported a secondary monitor, PowerPoint couldn’t.  So if you wanted to use PowerPoint along with SSP, you needed to use the primary monitor for your display window. 

Another reason was that back at that time, dual monitor systems were typically made up of two video cards, not dual head video cards.  One of the cards would be in an AGP slot, the other in a PCI slot.  The AGP video card would naturally be the better video card.  However, the system would set it as the primary monitor again requiring that the primary monitor be used for the display window.

The problem then is that many of the Windows system user interface mechanisms, such as open, save, and print windows, will pop up in the primary monitor even if the calling application was located in the secondary monitor.  This is actually still the case even with Windows XP.  Because of this, much work went into helping to ensure that pop up windows and messages would show up only in the same monitor as the SSP control window.  However, even with all that work, it’s difficult to ensure that this problem will never occur. 

With the latest dual head video card technology, and with the PowerPoint problem addressed, there’s little reason use the primary monitor for the display window.  Using this setup will help ensure that your display will remain distraction free when using SSP and other applications during a service.

(DI005)