i installed red hat 9 on my system. during installation, my Geforce fx 5700 was not detected correctly, but the display was fine. When i tried playing tux racer, the fps was very low. So changed my display settings to recognise my card as a Geforce 4 (Generic). i got a message that my new settings would be applied after restart. I restarted my PC and all the problems started. Niw, i cant make out anything written in the screen and is therefore impossible to navigate back to the "control panel" of linux. I have no idea of command line, i'm an newbie. Please help restore my original settings.

to fix this you're gonna have to know a little about the command line... you're gonna want to edit your /etc/inittab so that your box starts in multi-user mode (without X) and then you can install the official nvidia drivers:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html

or you can boot from your red hat cd and mount your hard disk, so that from there you can edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file back to the way it was... i'm guessing it was using the VESA drivers when it worked okay, i'm not sure...