I made the mistake of setting a resolution that my monitor (ViewSonic VA721, not that it matters) can't handle, and now I can't figure out how to get back to a setting that my monitor can handle. When I first made the bad setting, the screen went black except for an "Out of Range" message in the middle, and wouldn't let me see anything to put it back. I ended up going to a text screen with a <Ctrl-Alt-F1>, logging in as root, and rebooting.

Now, I can use all of my other user IDs (root, KDE test, "email only," etc.) just fine, but if I log in to the one with the bad res. setting, it just blacks the screen and I have to reboot again. The xorg.conf file doesn't even have any options for setting resolutions any more, so there's no way to explicitly disallow the one I set, and "deleting" (renaming) xorg.conf didn't help. If I could figure out where the session stores its display settings, maybe I could reset it from another login, or at least delete the file in question and log in using a default setting, but so far I haven't been able to figure it out.

Any ideas? As my topic line says, the user in question is set up with the Gnome desktop and I'm running on Fedora 9. I've considered renaming the crippled account's home directory and deleting the user, then re-creating it and restoring the home directory, but I'd rather fix it "right" (i.e., by simply correcting the wrong setting) if possible.

Never mind, I found it. The file I needed is ~/.gnome2/monitors.xml, and right in the middle are two items tagged <width> and <height>. I changed those to legal values, and everything works fine again.

I figured this would be a RTFM fix, if I could only find the right FM to read...