Monterey scrambles my virtual desktops

Ah ha!! I believe I've figured out what is causing my symptoms ... but I do not yet have a solution to prevent it from happening.

I have two external monitors on my MacBook, both in "Extended Display" mode. My Built-in Retina (3072x1920) on the left, an older low-res "SyncMaster" display in vertical mode (90º rotation, 1200x1600) in the middle and my 75" Sony TV (1920x1080) on the right. I put the MacBook to sleep before I close the lid, but it decides to wake up itself from time to time.

I currently have 14 virtual desktops. Many of these normally live on the built-in display and contain four XQuartz windows arranged such that each one occupies a quarter of the screen, NW, NE, SW, SE. Sometimes when I open the MacBook, I find that all the windows that were located on the left (west) side of all of these virtual desktops have migrated to the left side of some other virtual desktop and I have to drag them back to their respective project's desktop that still contain the windows that started out on the right side of the screen.

My theory is that the auto-wakeup is somehow trying to render these desktops on the narrow display, finding that the windows on the left side of the screen won't fit and deciding that they were dragged onto some other desktop. I cannot reproduce this behavior by dragging one of these virtual desktops to the narrow display. That properly renders the windows as overlapping and when dragged back to a wide display the windows get pushed back out into their respective corners (sort of).

This issue did not occur until upgrading to Monterey. I had issues with all my windows getting bunched up in the upper left corner of their respective desktop, but at least they didn't migrate to other desktops.

I have not yet contacted Apple support as I seem to have to talk to a live person rather than describing my issues via, say, email (and then I have to repeat it all to the next person I talk to after I get mysteriously disconnected), but now that I have a better insight as to what's happening I'll try that route. I just figured I'd update this thread while the epiphany was still fresh in my mind.

Yes, I'm well aware how to use my virtual desktops ... right now I have thirteen of them.

It's not just XQuartz that has the problem ... note that I said that a couple of browser windows (Firefox) also migrated to the different desktop as well. XQuartz is just the app that I have the most windows of and the one whose window positioning is most critical. I want this window in the upper left corner, that one in the lower right, etc.

This spontaneous migration of application windows between virtual desktops did not occur before I upgraded to Monterey. It doesn't happen every time I close the lid and open it again, but it happens frequently enough to be painfully annoying. It seems to happen randomly; if I could figure out how to reproduce it I'd give you more specifics.

Yep, I'm running XQuartz 2.8.1 ... if something comes out post-Monterey I'll surely update.

I'm just posting here in the hopes that someone else can replicate the issues I'm seeing. It seems to require two external monitors, one of which might be a bit slower to come online when it receives a signal. But I can only speak from empirical evidence.