I also noticed that the installation disk wouldn't go beyond 1024 x 786 either. It could be the machine. It is a Frankenstein creation that evolves rather than become replaced. It's quirky. When I put in the new video card (GeForce Ti4200) a while ago, Win2k would crash when it went into sleep mode so I had to disable that as well. In any event, I wiped it and put Ubuntu back and upgraded it to hoary which now has KDE. So I now have up to 1600 x 1200 although my eyes now like 1280 x 1024 better.
Now my only problem is updating grub manually when the kernel is updated (my machine thinks the SCSI drives are hd0 and hd1, and grub thinks they are hd2 and hd3). And I have to update my fstab by hand to get to data on my fat32 partitions, which is no biggie.
Thanks for the help. It is always appreciated.
Hugh