Skewed proportion on fonts and images.

Okay, this is a strange one.

My screen ratio seems to be mangled. Everything looks too narrow for it's height. (Of course it would be equivalent to say that it looks too tall for its width, but I think it's the former. Things seem to have the right height.) This includes all images, icons, fonts, everything but the desktop background image, which seems normal, and the windows, which are also okay. Everything seems to be about 20% narrower than it should be. It doesn't seem to be the monitor settings; I've fiddled with them a fair bit, and can't come close to resolving this.

I'm on Windows XP Pro, a Dell Dimension 4500, with a standard Dell CRT on a NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420.

I'm afraid my eight-year old son has discovered how to customize his desktop, and he said that he had made changes to both his and his little sister's settings just before anyone noticed this, but we've undone everything he remembers doing, to no avail. And besides, it doesn't seem likely to be user settings, since it's affecting the start-up screens and all user accounts.

I emailed a screenshot of a window to work, and it looks perfectly normal from there, but on the machine in question, it appears as warped as everything else.

Any suggestions or pointers to useful resources would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

-- Scott

 

If the boy didn't mess with the monitor settings, a system restore point ought to put it right again. I had a similar problem after I let the five year old "dust ", but I managed to push enough buttons on the monitor in an orderly fashion to correct what he did.

Johanna