Wallpaper settings reset constantly (monitor identification issues)

[OneNot]

I've tried all the settings under "Monitor Identification". All of them eventually lose the settings for all my wallpapers.

My setup is:
AW3423DWF (2K Ultrawide) and some LG 2K Ultrawide (might have been 34WN750-B) on top of the other. So two ultrawides on top of each other with WPE set to "Stretch single Wallpaper" across them both.
I do occasionally make changes that could maybe cause some kind of ID resets like: switching HDR on/off, switching refresh rates, switching Gsync on/off. Though the break never happens then. It always happens when waking Windows up from sleep or booting from shutdown.

This is probably the same issue as here, but as I said, I've tried all the identification methods, so the solution from that post doesn't help me.

I don't know how WPE identifies the monitors on each setting exactly, but whenever WPE loses the wallpaper settings I check some of the info windows reports for the monitors and I will say the "Hardware ID", "Compatible ID" and "Display name" of the monitors never change, so if those could be tapped into to identify the monitors, I would assume it should work...?

[Roger_BRUH]

Have you tried enabling "Safe start after hibernation" option? I had a similar issue where I lost my wallpaper settings after waking Windows up from sleep and a developer suggested this fix which worked for me.

[OneNot]

Originally posted by Roger_BRUH:

Have you tried enabling "Safe start after hibernation" option? I had a similar issue where I lost my wallpaper settings after waking Windows up from sleep and a developer suggested this fix which worked for me.

My wallpapers do load "normally" after sleep, they just forget their settings. It also doesn't happen after every sleep (I think? I haven't tracked it that close...)
But anyway, thanks, I'll try that.

I also reset my config now and made a tiny playlist with only 3 wallpapers and made changes to only those 3. I then took a copy of my current config.json and intend to compare the copy to the current json if it breaks again, to see what exactly changes.

[OneNot]

Originally posted by OneNot:

Originally posted by Roger_BRUH:

Have you tried enabling "Safe start after hibernation" option? I had a similar issue where I lost my wallpaper settings after waking Windows up from sleep and a developer suggested this fix which worked for me.

My wallpapers do load "normally" after sleep, they just forget their settings. It also doesn't happen after every sleep (I think? I haven't tracked it that close...)
But anyway, thanks, I'll try that.

I also reset my config now and made a tiny playlist with only 3 wallpapers and made changes to only those 3. I then took a copy of my current config.json and intend to compare the copy to the current json if it breaks again, to see what exactly changes.

Okay, with those changes, I put windows to sleep and waited a bit for good measure. After restoring from sleep, everything appeared to work fine.
Still, I'm not yet convinced. When I went through all the monitor identification options, it usually worked for a day or two on each option before again losing all wallpaper settings.

So yeah, I'll keep things like this, and I'll report back if it breaks again, or if it doesn't, great! I'll report that too eventually.

[OneNot]

Okay, reporting back to say it's still working.
Looks like that fixed it then!
Thanks again!

[OneNot]

Well never mind, lost all settings again...

[OneNot]

Okay new info.
I restored an old config and the playlist now looks like this[i.imgur.com].
Playing though the playlist (by pressing "next wallpaper" from the taskbar) shows the wallpapers correctly with no issues, but selecting the same wallpaper from the menu doesn't load the right settings for that wallpaper.

i.e. All settings have reset, but the ones stored in the playlist itself, though they appear broken in the list, work just fine and have the old settings.

This doesn't really help me, but it does tell me that there is no functional issue with whatever is going wrong, WPE just constantly thinks the monitors have changed, presumably is why the playlist appears like that: because they are "for another monitor setup".

[Capt.Luke]

did you try this ?
Essentially, your graphics card drivers keep assigning your monitors new identifiers which leads Wallpaper Engine to believe that you are trying to configure a new monitor. You can fix this by changing the "Monitor identification" option in the General tab of the Wallpaper Engine settings to Layout or GDI
then close wallpaper totally
restart your computer

[OneNot]

Originally posted by Capt.Luke:

did you try this ?
Essentially, your graphics card drivers keep assigning your monitors new identifiers which leads Wallpaper Engine to believe that you are trying to configure a new monitor. You can fix this by changing the "Monitor identification" option in the General tab of the Wallpaper Engine settings to Layout or GDI
then close wallpaper totally
restart your computer

Like I said, I tried all the options, and some of them worked for a while, including layout, but all of them eventually lost the settings after some days.

I didn't restart my PC right away after changing the setting, only restarted WPE, like the program prompts you to. That said, many of the options survived multiple shutdowns during the periods that each worked. I'm fairly sure that is true for Layout as well, but I can't be entirely sure, as I sometimes do only put my PC to sleep, instead of a full shutdown. Still, I probably did a full shutdown a few times during my time with the Layout option too, before it broke.

I too though maybe Layout would be the answer to my questions since, it (I would think) didn't rely on the identifiers in the same way, but no.

My current "workaround" is to save a preset for every single wallpaper as I adjust them, so that maybe those aren't lost when I next lose my settings (we'll see if that is the case...), making restoring them at least a little bit easier.

I'm not holding my breath, but the next time I lose my settings, I'll do it like you say: Put it on layout, close WPE, and do a full reboot right away.

I'll report back...

[OneNot]

Well, that was a pretty good month long streak. It broke again (partly).

It was working fine when I opened the UI to change some things just now, but I noticed it wasn't connected to steam (because I didn't have steam running), so I closed the WPE UI (closed to tray only) and booted up Steam. After Steam was up and running, I once again opened the WPE UI and now it's broken. Nothing changed in between these two actions, as far as I can tell, besides connecting to Steam. (I tried completely closing and restarting WPE after, which was no help)

Just like before, the current playlist works just fine and loads the correct settings for each wallpaper when cycling through the playlist, but all the wallpapers appear broken in the playlist UI like so[i.imgur.com]. Though this time, only some of the latest wallpapers lost their saved settings. But all of them do report as not being a part of the playlist.

Also, it turns out the per wallpaper local presets are also tied to the monitor setup, as all the wallpapers that have lost their settings, have also lost the local presets, meaning I can't use those to restore the right settings like I had hoped.

At least this time it was just the playlist and a few wallpapers that broke, so getting everything back to normal just meant adjusting the settings again for those few wallpapers that lost them, and rebuilding the playlist.

Since changing to Layout mode would likely mean losing the settings for all the wallpapers, I still did not do the following:

Originally posted by OneNot:

I'm not holding my breath, but the next time I lose my settings, I'll do it like you say: Put it on layout, close WPE, and do a full reboot right away.

(see previous comment)

Edit:
I won't add a new comment for this, but I'll just add that it happened again, in the same way as this comment describes, only this time just the latest wallpaper lost its settings. (07.05.2025)