Thought this might be of some use to folks...
After a while, I got fed up of having to switch between extended and spaned profiles for gaming and desktop use.
As a long standing user of SoftTH, which seem to have the most seemless desktop to span mode when loading games, I took at look at how something similar could be done for ATI. (i dont have a pair of nvidia cards to test nvidias own solution).
First you will need to create your profiles for extended and span/group modes.
Once you have these, I call mine "extend" and "span" you can setup some .bat files to do the switching of profiles and launching of games for you.
Code:
@ECHO OFF
ECHO Switching profiles and loading game, please wait . . .
"C:Program Files (x86)ATI TechnologiesATI.ACECore-StaticCLI.exe" Start Load profilename="span"
"U:gamesSteamSteamAppscommonleft 4 dead 2left4dead2.exe"
ECHO Restoring profiles, please wait . . .
"C:Program Files (x86)ATI TechnologiesATI.ACECore-StaticCLI.exe" Start Load profilename="extend"
ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 6000 > NULL
"C:Program Files (x86)ATI TechnologiesATI.ACECore-StaticCLI.exe" Start Load profilename="extend"
Note: I need to load the extned profile twice otherwise the outside 2 monitors are swapped around for some bizzare reason.
Because of this we need to insert a delay of 6 seconds before calling the extended profile again thus here I have used "ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 6000 > NULL"
I then simply change the game's shortcut to point to the .bat file, and change the icon for the .bat file to that of the game.
This will switch to the span mode profile, launch Left 4 Dead 2, then when the game closes, it will automaticly switch back to extend mode.
Not quite as seemless as I would like, but it is a step closer Cheesy
Hope this is of use to some.