Hi.

I am using Hoary Hedgehog, with an nVidia 5900xt card. I have installed the official nVidia driver, and all is almost good...

My monitor starts up at 1600x1200 every time. I can change the resolution to 1280x1024 (much better for my eyes), but the next time that I power down and restart the computer, it is ALWAYS back to 1600x1200. How can I fix this? And, yes. I tried checking the box that would make 1280x1024 the default -- no luck.

Note that I did install the Kubuntu desktop and had KDE as my default log-in manager, but switched back to Gnome. I do not know if this broke anything.

I would also prefer to simply edit a text file, rather than have to completely re-configure X (I am still rather new, and would rather not risk breaking something).

I don't know if this'll make a difference, but since no one else has answered your post, have you tried going to System > Preferences > Sessions and selecting "Automatically Save Changes to Session"?

Thanks for the thought, but no luck. It seems that I am stuck to forever power-on at 1600x1200. Annoying, but not the end of the world.

try
open a terminal write
sudo gedit
browse to etc/X11/xorg.conf
open this file and look at the settings
place ## before the setting u dont wish to use

this way the system will not read them at boot ...