This is by no means a PC-only blog but given the number of users on PCs and the widespread issue around these calibration profiles unloading after restart or wake-up, I thought this quick tip would help many of you with this problem. The symptom is that after calibrating your monitor and creating the ICM profile, you restart your computer to see that the new profile loads properly as soon as your calibration software profile loader kicks in (startup) but then a few seconds later your notice your screen goes back to its uncalibrated mode, indicating your calibration profile was unloaded for some reason. This profile reset (LUT reset) also happens when you wake your computer from sleep mode. Originally Vista had an issue with resetting LUTs (your graphics card Look-up-Tables) bu that was apparently addressed through a patch earlier this year, however the problem didn’t stop there, video card drivers (ATi and nVidia) were in question as well. So the first thing before proceeding is making sure you have the latest video card drivers installed. Then, here’s what you need to do to workaround having to manually reload your calibration profiles on a restart or wake up:

1. From your start menu type “msconfig” in the “start search” box and hit “enter” to launch the tool. In there go to the “startup” tab (Figure 1 below) and disable any nVidia or ATI startup tasks, these are (in many cases) resetting your profile at boot time.
    
2. To re-load your calibration profile automatically when your computer wakes up, the only good workaround IMO is creating a simple task in Windows Task Scheduler that runs your profile loader app (ColorVisionStartup.exe for Spyder product for instance) at wake up time. To do this, go your control panels -> Administrative Tools->Task Scheduler and create a new “basic” task called “LUT loader” or something like that. Configure the “action” to execute your calibration software’s profile loader (Figure 2 below). And the trigger should be something that happens when the computer wakes up, in this case I chose a network event (TCP/IP) which should work for you too if your computer is connected to the internet or local network (Figure 3). You must also type the eventID 4201 as indicated in Figure 3. The figures below show you the steps.

 Figure 1: disable startup items
 

Figure 2: Create task (action)
 

Figure 3: Task trigger