This isn’t officially verified but it appears that Microsoft has fixed a glitch that has persisted for quite a while in Windows Media Center. 

UPDATE: This glitch hasn’t been fixed at all.  My system glitching made it seem as if it was fixed.  However, pressing the Windows key yields the desired result of being able to use your mouse cursor on another screen until you click on the Media Center again, at which point the cursor becomes trapped on that screen again.  Sorry for the misunderstanding.  I wish someone would get Microsoft to fix this annoyance.

I say not verified because for all I know my system is glitching which is temporarily fixing the glitch.  But back to the topic.  For a while now if you used Windows Media Center with a multiple monitor setup, if you maximized the application on one monitor, your cursor was stuck to that screen unless you Alt+Tab to an app on another monitor, or use the Windows key.  This is basically an annoyance, though a workaround was to resize the window to almost 100% of the screen.

  windows-vista-media-centerI’m not sure if the “annoyance” has been fixed through an update, or through Windows 7 as I recently installed a copy of Windows 7 Pro RTM.  All that I can say for sure is that I maximized Media Center while watching and recording Big Brother and was delighted to notice I could still move my mouse over to a second monitor and do the Facebook thing.  For me at least, this is a big convenience.  As a multitasker, I often will do something like watch football on the big screen and check my email on the small screen, and this is a big help. Now lets just hope Microsoft keeps the tv/dvr functionality in Media Center for the long term as it really is the best free and easily available DVR for Windows.