Greetings, everyone.

I have a Surface Book laptop running at 200% scaling in Windows settings. Whenever I try to launch an old, low-resolution game it works fine, it fills the whole screen while maintaining the proper ratio.

The problem happens when I exit the fullscreen mode back to the desktop. All of my open apps get resized and put in the top left corner of the screen, unless their windows are maximized (and even then when you de-maximize them, they are still messed up). It appears as if each window gets resized to the resolution my fullscreen mode was in.

Now this obviously doesn't happen when using 100% scaling. I have a desktop computer with a regular DPI screen and everything is great. Seems like it's the Windows scaling that is the issue, it screws up all open apps when exiting a non-native resolution fullscreen mode.

Has anybody encountered this? How do you deal with it?

It's weird to me that this looks like a very obvious issue to encounter, but I haven't found much about it online.

Aye, encountered it too. Gave up on scaling.

What do you mean you gave up on scaling?

This laptop would be unusable at 100%. 3000x2000 is just a lot of pixels, everything is insanely tiny without scaling.

Same here. Windows is currently still s??t at scaling. I use 4 2516D at work and i just gave up. Sad but true, I just run 2 of them in FHD resolution. :(

To OP: If a DosBox game, I usually change config to run in windowed mode and at some resolution I like (usually 800x600 in config), maybe try it if it fritzes up still? IDK, can't try as at home I only have FHD monitor and a 1600x900 laptop. (https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox.conf and maybe a quick googling showed an easier instruction https://joshmccarty.com/optimize-dosbox-for-modern-screens/)

If some older game but not in DosBox check PCgamingwiki, meybe ther's a fix. But yes, DPI scaling has always been buggy in Windows :(.

On the 1920*1080 23" monitor i just squint or dig out my reading glasses, on bigger, i do like dewtech and lower the resolution. Maybe Windows 10 is better at scaling? Only Win 10 computers I have access to have tiny resolutions.

Windows 10 creators update include some new compatibility options for that high dpi problem, but it not selected as default...

No, Creators Update didn't help. As far as I know, they were mostly fixing issues with multi-monitor setups.

The one I'm describing is basically like all the other app windows get resized/scaled to fit the fullscreen mode, and after coming back from it, they don't realize it's time to resize back to where they were.

As this is a high DPI laptop, I can't use it at 100%, 200% is the comfortable scaling. This is so annoying...

One other thing I've discovered is that it seems like some fullscreen resolutions don't cause this, for example I've managed to run one game at 1600x1200 fullscreen, and after coming back there were no issues with other windows. I'll test this more thoroughly.

It seems like not everyone understands the problem you're describing but I do. For me it is two-fold. My primary display is 2560x1600 native resolution, and when starting a game up in a resolution lower than this either because I chose to play it in a lower than native resolution to increase the frame rate or some other reason, or because a given game does not have an option to play at my native panel resolution, with some games (but not all games), this causes Windows for whatever reason to resize various applications that were running in a maximized window to go into windowed mode at the window size that matches the lower resolution the game was running in, and then stay at that lower size when I exit the game. This forces me to have to go and re-maximize every window on the screen and do it twice because Windows seems to still think they're already maximized so the first time unmaximizes the window to different dimensions, then the second time it maximizes it back to the proper size.

The second problem is on multihead configuration, where the same problem occurs but often half my programs that were running on the primary display have been forcibly shifted to one of the secondary displays. I have to spend 5 minutes moving all my programs back to the correct monitor after I exit the game, and many of those programs are in windowed-mode in a tiny window instead of maximized as they were when I launched the game.

I know of now way to resolve either of these issues unanimously, and it seems to depend on the exact game launched what the nature of the problem is and how it manifests itself, with the oldest of games giving the greatest of annoying problems.

P.S. I'm not using the Windows scaling option for high-DPI displays, nor am I using the unrelated GPU driver scaling options for fullscreen applications, just the default hardware scaling done in the monitor. The problems described have nothing to do with any form of scaling on my system, but are related to how Windows saves and restores the desktop and how full screen hardware resolution changes invoked by video games interact with the Windows desktop.

I have encountered what skeletonbow describes as well, on Linux too, really annoying.

My solution to this is to not run anything else besides the games I play themselves. Yes the resolution scale bug is annoying.