Full screen game disables second monitor

Good morning all,

I have 2 monitors - the primary runs from my discrete HD6870 and is a 1920x1200, the secondary is driven from the onboard HD4200 and is 1280x1024. The driver is Catalyst 12.1 which behaves very well. I do not wish to upgrade to 12.2 or 12.3 as several of my games have issues with those drivers. All earlier drivers have given the same problem. My o/s is Win7pro64SP1.

I have no issues with any productivity application or media player or any basic windows in full screen. My issue is that when I run a game fullscreen on the primary monitor the secondary monitor gets disabled such that I cannot get my mouse onto that part of the desktop (the desktop and any applications open on it remain there). As I use the second monitor for things like teamspeak, and other things I like to have access to whilst gaming, this is quite irritating. My current work around is having a laptop for those functions but that is not an acceptable longterm solution.

Googling has brought lots of results of how to disable a second monitor to prevent interferance with a poorly written game, but I am after the opposite. Running a game in windowed mode and then maximising the window seems a bit of a cludge and I would prefer a more elegant solution that does not give me a border around the game.

Any help would be greatly appreciated and a real fix will get a 'best answer'.

Q