connecting laptop to TV

I have two Vista machines. One with Vista Ultimate and one with Vista Enterprise. I can connect them to my Phillips 37" LCD TV but the only thing that appears on the tv is the desktop picture. No icons or anything else. that is all I can do is look at the desktop picture. I have tried to hook these both up using DVI to HDMI connections and also S video.
When I hook a Windows XP Pro machine up to the TV via Svideo, it works fine.
All OS's have the latests updates. I have made sure that the resolution is correct, but cannot get the vista machines to show anything except the desktop picture. I can't even get the Icons to show up.
Does anyone else have this problem?
If so, do you know how to correct it?

Hmmm...sound like you have extended desktop going. Two choices. First, when you open something on the laptop, you can drag it over to the other screen(right I think) or you can set you display up in "clone" mode, in the control panel>diplsy

since i dont have this hardware i cant tell you exactly whats wrong or what to do. But i can tell you to have a look in control panel under display or ONLY if all else fails...Read the manual LOL

Thanks for the responses, but I figured it out. It was a setting in the BIOS. Had to change it to VGA and DVI for the output.