I use a desktop manager called Virtual Dimension.  Great thing.  It allows me to have multiple desktops (Linux style) in Windows.  Once you get used to having multiple desktops there is no turning back.

I also use PuTTY for my job.  I recently ran into a problem with PuTTY where the close X would grey out and the Close option would disappear, seemingly at random, from the context menu.  If I wanted to close a PuTTY window I would have to kill the process (Task Manager –> End Process).  The trouble with that is of course that when I have more than one PuTTY window open I have to guess which PuTTY entry to kill.  Not a reasonable solution.

Well, after a bit of research and some testing I discovered that the X would grey out immediately upon my switching from one desktop to another.  Clearly this was a problem between these two applications.  If it came down to it, I would have to give up Virtual Dimension because I had to use PuTTY for my job.  Panic set in.

As fortune would have it, others more tallented than myself were also experiencing this trouble.  A fix was made to PuTTY to accomodate this interaction and merely moving to a newer revision of PuTTY solved the problem.

Now I have my cake and eat it too.

ADDENDUM

Turns out the newest version of PuTTY (.60) doesn’t include support for GSSAPI which we need.  So I had to roll back to our bugged version, and I couldn’t find a version that had both the bug fixed and support for GSSAPI.  All hope is not lost though.  I did find that Alt-f4 will still close the defective windows thanks to a bug report for Virtual Dimension (tested and confirmed).

Best of luck.