Plex Opening in the Hidden / Phantom Window

I have been a Plex user for close to 10 years now. Recently I moved my desktop to a new home office and installed my dual monitor setup in a different arrangement. My Primary monitor used to sit in the center and the secondary used to sit on the right side.

On the new setup, i decided to move the secondary to the left side of the primary monitor. And after a couple of hours i noticed, when i opened the plex windows desktop app ( not the home theater one ), it opened to the right side of my primary monitor and in a place where the secondary monitor used to be.

Regardless of what i did, it won’t open or move to any of the monitors. It took me a while, but it turns out that plex saves it last opened position in a ini file. Since the last time i opened Plex and it was in the position where the secondary monitor used to be, it calculated its position using a X Y pixel count from what the Operating system was reporting as the center of the screen.

The Solution

Open your file explorer, navigate to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Plex\plex.ini . The username here is your windows Username. Note - The AppData is a hidden folder. Make sure to set your hidden file view on.

Open the file with a text editor, preferably something more modern than Notepad, but Notepad will still work.

Use CTRL + F or find to find this exact line windowX. Usually, this will be near the bottom of the file.

Change the value of the following lines to what you see here.

windowX=1 
windowY=1  
windowWidth=1000  
windowHeight=900  
windowStates=0

In here, windowX and windowY is the most important one, which determines where plex will open up. Once thats done, save the file.

Note - Your plex app must be closed during this.

Open plex, now it should open up in your main screen. You might need to fiddle with resizing the plex window a couple of time to get the top action bar back.

Happy Plexing