Actually, I just tried this in Windows and it didn't work. It works fine in Linux. So then what I did was manually set the SDL_VIDEO_WINDOW_POS environment variable via Control Panel-System-Environment Variables and then rebooted my system. Then when I ran my program it placed the window in the position I entered in the environment variable value. Only, what it actually did was place the client-area in the desired position, not the window itself. I chose 10,10, so the top part of the window, i.e. the window caption bar, was off the screen. Weird. But anyway it seems that the SDL_putenv function doesn't work in Windows, at least with my version of the SDL library (1.2.9).