I have an IBM ThinkPad 390X laptop with Windows Millennium that will only start up with large icons. (During startup, after the "Windows Me" logo screen appears and disappears, on a blank screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left, it always gives a two part beep ("beBOOP") before the desktop appears.

Before this problem started, I turned off the laptop and disconnected the power adapter overnight. Someone else started it up the following day without reconnecting the adapter. Apparently the battery was low because it beeped once weakly and shut off. Ever since then it will only display large icons at 800x600 resolution. When I go into Display Properties to try to reset it to a higher resolution (1024x780), it always reverts at startup to 800x600.

NOTE: At first, the mouse pointer would not appear. I found out I should look for garbage in "system.ini" which I found and removed. (Before that, I ended up replacing vmouse.vxd with mmouse.vxd). THe mouse and cursor work now, but I can't get the LCD to go back to normal.

Is this a hardware problem, a driver problem, or a Windows problem? Is there a solution for it without taking it to be serviced?

I think at first I would check it's not a driver problem by download the latest update for your graphics card off the internet. Maybe one of these links will help:

Nvidia Drivers
ATI Drivers

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried to pursue it generically, as it were. Neither of the suggested sites works because the graphics card is from NeoMagic. They're no longer supporting what they did for laptops - they're all into handhelds now. Other companies are handing support.

The drivers already seem to be present. I tried downloading one (nmgc5.drv) and replacing it but it made absolutely no change. Nothing got worse, either. There were two other driver file names when I displayed the driver properties under System Manager: "nmgc5vdd.vxd" and "vmm32.vxd". They seemed to be displayed under "nmgc5.drv" in a tree structure. (The actual directory of course was "C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM".)

Sorry if that's confusing. Guess it comes of being "separated by a common language," as Sir Winston put it. Let me know if you have other ideas. Thanks.:)

Check to see what Video adapter is selected. I suspect that what may have happened is the startup with a weak battery caused the video adapter to revert to SVGA. Solving this may be as simple as selecting the correct video adapter.

Try this: Thinkpad 390x drivers

Something appears to have worked, finally. But I'm not sure what. But the display is back to normal. Thanks for all help offered. (The last thing I did was to remove duplicate occurrences in Device Manager under Monitors and Display Adapters, and also an odd entry for an Infrared Port that I don't think we have).

It still complains about Rundll causing an error in MMSystem.dll, but after Rundll closes I still seem to have full functionality. It seems to be back to normal - I am conducting some testing. Unless I say something else you can consider this thread closed. Thanks again.