Identifying a Phantom or Ghost Monitor Issue in Display Settings

I recently encountered an unusual issue with my Mac Pro 3,1, which features an 8-core setup, running MacOS Mojave with the dosdude patch. I have a GTX760 2GB graphics card and an XT2600 256MB card.

In over 30 years of working with Macs, I have never seen anything like this before. In the Displays control panel, I have a phantom monitor displayed as attached to my system, despite not having any such hardware connected.

The menu indicates it might be a projector, which is odd, considering I don’t own a projector at all. I attempted to resolve the issue by deleting the displays plist file and resetting the NVRAM, but these actions did not solve the problem.

I think this phantom monitor may have appeared after I switched the monitor connection from one GPU to another while the Mac was still powered on. While this anomaly doesn’t disrupt my everyday use, I have it pushed to the side, out of sight.

However, it recently caused an issue for a remote support technician from Adobe who could not assist me because the phantom monitor interfered with his remote support application. Although it’s mostly a minor problem, the presence of this non-existent display is puzzling.

I’m curious if anyone else has experienced similar issues or has suggestions for how to address this oddity.

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