"Out of Range" error on Vista few seconds after logon

Hi there,

Got a problem here with Vista and the annoying "out of range" problem with the monitor unable to display the right resolution and/or refresh rate.
The problem happened after the user chose a higher resolution; "out of range" showed on the black screen but then they hit several keys not realising that they pressed the "accept" box.
Simple fix I thought, so I hit F8 on startup to get to the boot menu and chose Vista's "640x480" low res.
Now theres 2 user areas, the one she DIDNT use is fine, the one she does use (this is odd) loads for about 20 seconds. You can see explorer and the background and then all of a sudden the "out of range" comes up.

I've never seen this happen after a few seconds. Only straight away. Is it some Vista thing where after logging on it then changes to what it thinks is an OK refresh rate and resolution?
Went into safe mode and uninstalled the drivers for the Intel onboard graphics, reinstalled them and then the same thing happened. Its a CRT monitor being used and only shows as "default monitor" in the Display Properties (chance of finding Monitor drivers for an old Packard Bell CRT is pretty slim I think).

Any ideas on how to fix this problem? I presume theres some way of turning off Vista's "auto hi-res" feature or whatever its doing.

Much thanks for your replys,
Dan Gent

Hi,

I had a similar problem (in linux). In the end in turned out to be the graphics card not having enough RAM to support the ultra high selected res. As you're using on-board graphics, and if its is this way round, rather than the more likely monitor being the weak point, could you temporarily increase the amount of RAM assigned to the on-board graphics in BIOS to see if that enables access and alteration?

Thats not a bad idea. I've never messed around with any onboard graphics settings but I'm thinking as this is a Packard Bell the BIOS might be limited at best!

If all else fails I can try that or what I'm thinking of doing is just putting all the files onto another user area as other user areas work fine.

Damn Vista, this is one area thats defintiely worse than XP and a damn site worse than Linux where I could just delete unsupported resolutions manually from xorg.conf!