bad monitor?

Ok, I got a doozy for you. Last night, I play a little City of Heroes, then switch over and play a little Modern Warfare 2. Then I check the forums, my e-mail then switch off for the night. No problems, no issues.

This morning I switch on.. I hear the windows chimes, screen is blank. Hmm. I reboot. Same issue, only this time i mess with the mouse, a pointer appears, then as i slide it over to the side, it scrolls my desktop over, the resolution doesn't look the best either. I think Hmm extended desktop or something O.o ? . I go through my settings and nVidia's menus, there is nothing out of place. I even selected something different then set it back just to re 'apply' the settings. no dice. I find if i set the resolution to 1024x768, it fits the screen, anything else, it doesn't fit. I set my resolution back to 1680x1050 and let it go.

Here's where it looks interesting. I go into the monitors own onscreen menu, under information its showing as 1024x768, even though im set higher.

And more interesting still, I plug in an older 9 pin vga cable to the monitor (it has both) and use an adapter on the end to plug it into my graphic card's DVI socket.. Tada its perfect!

So why would my DVI cable grossly oversize my monitor yet my older one will not? Is the dvi signal decoder in my monitor scrambled? is it just the cable ? I have tried this on another graphics card and the same result happens. Is this something that happens from time to time?

A few possibilites for this

Could be a corrupted graphics driver

more likely though is windows has crashed whilst running something on a different resolutions or a failed update.
If this is the case just reset your resolution and put your icons back as you want them.

lastly check if you have changed the connector your monitor is connected to - different ports can have different settings - generally this is used for multiple monitors.
You can also check that your system is correctly identifying your monitor or if it is just using the basic windows driver this will show up as "Generic Monitor" - that will give a max resolution of 1024x768 iirc

Hmm. I'll have to coax the other monitor from the misses and do a switch a roo on them and see if still does it.

Update.

Swapped the monitors, my wifes worked fine on my computer, my monitor still looked bad on hers. Must be the digital converter inside my monitor, so i left it on analog for a time.

Then for no real reason, I decided to unplug my monitor over night. the next day.. the Digital DVI connection worked, its back to its old self again.

ok people. if you ever have weird glitchy monitor problems... unplug the bugga for a day >.<

Something tells me that the on/off switch.. is just another way of saying 'Standby' on this thing! O.o