Why does Windows suck so badly?

Last night we went to move the Isadora control PC from the design desk in the house to it's new location for the run. This involved moving the PC, 4 flatpanel monitors, and 3 cat5 VGA extenders, and associated cabling, and adding a 4th cat5 VGA extender, and a PS/2 keyboard/mouse extender to remote the control monitor/keyboard/mouse to the lighting booth.

Up until now the control monitor was connected via DVI, and although we have a DVI extender, I was unable to get it to work, so we moved to plan B, which is a VGA extender.

The configuration is 4 VGA extenders connected to 4 outputs from the PC, with 3 local monitors (for the 3 projectors) connected to the loop outputs of the extenders. The 4th monitor is the control screen, and is located in the lighting booth. There is currently no local monitor for the control screen.

The control monitor was screen1 (1680x1050), and the three projectors were screens 2, 3, and 4 (800x600).

When I switched screen1 from DVI to VGA, the video output for screens 1 and 2 switched ports. If I started with a DVI monitor plugged in, it would always come up as screen1, but the moment I unplugged it, the desktop would move to screen2.

If I started with a local monitor plugged into the loop output of the screen1 VGA extender, the screen resolution would claim to be 1680x1050, but both the local monitor, and the remote monitor upstairs would be in pan-scan mode. The same thing occurred if there was no local monitor connected. I ended up starting the PC with the extender disconnected, and the local monitor plugged directly into the card, and after the PC was up, replugging the screen1 extender to the card, and plugging the monitor back to it's correct output (loop output from extender for screen2).

I hate chasing after monitors. I want them to stay where I set them. I want to be able to assign any output to any screen. In X11 under Unix/Linux this is not a problem, It's just a configuration file, but Microsoft seems to have this attitude of "We know what you need, better than you do, so you will do as we decide, and you don't get any input into the matter."

Did I mention that I hate Windows?