I have Fedora 16/KDE installed on this laptop and I have a second display connected to it and I have two issues.

1 - if I forget to power up the second display when I boot the laptop, X will not see the other monitor (just get no sync), is there a way to scan for a hardware change so the OS just detects the monitor. If I power cycle the remote display once I have powered up correctly the hardware is not forgotten about.

2 - When I do start the laptop with the remote screen powered up I always have to change it so the remote display is on the left (for some reason it always defaults to being on the right). I know I could simply swap the display and laptop around - but I like things set up this way!

Part from that I kinda impressed I managed to breathe some life back into this laptop (from Windows).

Can anyone recommend anything to alleviate these problems ?

I should think that if you modprobe the driver for the graphics card, it should detect the availability of the additional monitor and begin sending signal to it.

Can't offer anything for item 2.

Have you tried installing the proper video drivers for your card. I have had better luck with the displays once I did that.