[Pagan]

I had some suspicions about that... I've tried it with vga=792 vga=exteneded, and no vga kernel parameter... same result and this is a custom 2.4.22 kernel build...

And to answer your question about exiting x:
I do a lot of work in a text console... both remote and local... liek forexample when compiling something large I'll use vc2 [ctrl+alt+f2] to compile and then switch back to x with alt+f7

Sometimes I won't be in x for days...