Is it possible to have a second monitor that is unaffected by fullscreen games on the first monitor?

I like to have movies and whatnot going on in my smaller second monitor, typically while playing games. Sadly, some older games have absolutely tiny resolutions compared to what my main monitor can crank out, and running them fullscreen pushes everything around on the second monitor.

As an example, say I run an 800X600 game on my main 1920X1080 monitor. Everything not in that 800X600space is then shoved onto my second monitor, thus pushing everything that was ACTUALLY on that monitor off into some weird negative space.

Is there anything I can do to prevent this, besides playing in windowed mode? I can't SEE anything with the windows that small, sadly. My eyes aren't the best.

Is your "main" monitor on the left side? I have a 3 monitor setup with the main monitor in the middle and have noticed that my left screen is fine and dandy even when the middle screen has a superlow resolution, but the right screen is doomed to a life of weirdness (the right screen hence gets the least use and is often used for console games instead of PC use at all).

Try rearranging your PC monitors in Screen Resolution so the main monitor is on the right and see if that helps at all. I'm not sure if there's any way to alter the "handedness" of the resolution screw up, but I've mitigated this problem by using the left screen.

I'm pretty sure desktop icons are basically doomed though--if they're on monitor X and monitor X is too small to hold them, they WILL be pushed away; I solve this by not having many icons the main monitor, personally. Also, if you're having problems with Steam Big Picture mode...I think you're just doomed, I've found no solution to it's weird shifting around due to lower res fullscreen, since it's tied to the main monitor after all.

I have not personally used it, but my brother bought DisplayFusion (now available on Steam!) because it's supposed to fix this exact issue.

It supposedly also fixes the issue where changing the resolution screws up your desktop icons.