Windows forgetting resolution

[Unfocused]

Today upon booting Vista on my laptop I was greeted with my desktop at 800x600 and the icons covering the whole screen. I could probably count on one hand the number of times this happened during the past 6 months, but still it's a bit annoying, considering the icons don't remember their place after switching back to a normal resolution and I have to arrange them again.

Any ideas why this is happening? Everything else is fine, so I don't think it's my GPU failing.

 

[VirusType2]

Is a game causing it?

I had problems with a very old game in XP. For some reason, playing the game would reset the desktop resolution and color level. So after playing, I'd have low resolution and 16 bit color instead of true color. Never found a solution other than to keep changing it back or stop playing that game. I never bothered to research the problem.

 

[Unfocused]

I'm not sure, it might be associated, cause recently it happened twice within a week or two.

First it was at a time when I was playing Vampire: Bloodlines at 1024x768, but I ran the game everyday for a few days and it happened only once. Plus, upon exiting the resolution successfully switched to my usual 1280x800 every time.

Second time it was the next day after I played Penumbra, which somehow defaulted to 800x600, but I changed it to 1280x800 and played at this resolution.

Bear in mind, this happens on startup, after the system is shutdown at a normal resolution.

By the way - is there a way for Windows to remember the icon arrangement on the desktop? If there isn't then it's very weird that through all the versions of Windows they haven't come up with a way to do this. I hate when I get my resolution lowered as a result of some problem, or I drop something on the desktop, by mistake in the place of another icon, and the icons get messed up.

 

[Adabiviak]

Your username is ironically appropriate. I've never run Vista, but I've had games crash, leaving Windows in a sketchy resolution (only in XP, where a reboot would bring everything back to normal and in 7, but 7 has managed to recover without a hitch). Run msconfig and see if anything is running at startup that should not be.