Comment 15 for bug 248769

You have to close and restart AWN after changing the monitor. These are things AWN had wrong before because AWN currently stores all of its settings in a AwnSettings class (which gets updated when the GConf values change) but it doesn't propagate those changes to the rest of AWN. AwnPanel, AwnHotspon, AwnBar, etc would all need to be notified of configuration changes (they currently aren't) and then deal with them correctly. You would have the same problems if you toggled the force_monitorm, monitor_width, or panel_mode settings before my patch.

In Neil's trunk rewrite, AwnSettings goes away and everything that actually cares about the settings has its own notify function such that the correct behavior you and I both desire can be obtained... but with the infrastructure currently in trunk, it's just not feasible without a huge amount of effort that ultimately boils down to one of the changes in the trunk rewrite: properly responding to configuration changes.