In a computer system having a display device with a display surface, a portion of the display surface is reserved for an exclusive use by a program, to allow contents rendered by the program to be persistently visible. In one embodiment, the reservation is accomplished through reducing the width and height of a shared portion of the display surface managed by a window manager, corresponding to a graphics resolution. In another embodiment, the reservation is accomplished by having the window manager work with a pixel resolution smaller than the operative pixel resolution of the display device driver. In one embodiment, the reservation is made only while the computer system is "on-line". In one embodiment, the exclusive use is to render advertisements in the reserved portion by an advertising rendering program. The advertisements are HTML pages received from an advertisement web server through the Internet. The HTML pages are rendered in the reserved portion through a direct draw component. The direct draw component is provided with the unreduced width and height as the width and height of the surface area to support direct drawing of displays. A cursor control device driver also supports monitoring of movements of a cursor control device and of occurrences of cursor events. The cursor control device driver is likewise provided with the unreduced width and height as the width and height of the surface area to monitor for cursor movements and events. In other embodiments, multiple portions of the display surface are reserved for advertising and/or other exclusive uses. In yet other embodiments, full screen applications, including those that utilize page flipping are accommodated.