GlennD It was doing that before I had connected the monitor. Prior to that I never had a monitor connected. I only hooked it up for the purposes of making sure the laptop functioned normally with the lid closed while in front of it and not using Logmein.
Having said that, I re-connected the monitor (laptop lid still closed), connected to the laptop via Logmein, and opened programs. Everything opened on the main laptop display and not the secondary external monitor. I then disconnected from Logmein, turned off the laptop, unplugged the monitor, rebooted and re-connected. it repeated the same symptoms as my first post.
I did the Windows snapping keyboard shortcuts to reconfirm nothing was "hidden" on a display that wasn't showing. I used all instances of the Win key + up, down, left, right arrows to no success.
Finally, the suggestion doesn't answer the other part of my issues - the programs or windows that actually launch and display for me will not close when I click the X at the top right of a program. And when I click on the Windows start menu nothing pops up. These items have nothing to do with potential things appearing off-screen.
Just a heads up that my issue is still going on, and I explained the response that GlennD provided was not a solution.
