I don’t use XP Home, so I’m asking Dopers.
One of my users has XP home at his house. It changes the resolution to low for some applications. He changes it in the control panel to high, and it will display 1024 x 768 until the next time he runs the app; then it’s back to 800 x 600.
Antone know what’s going on?
Thanks
gaming software?
He claims it happens with MS Word.
I’ve never heard of Word doing anything so drastic; I’ve seen some older applications do this; particularly ‘electronic book’ style CD-ROMs and kids interactive multimedia stuff.
It may be that he’s talking about a specific Word document that does this when opened, in which case perhaps it has some embedded object that is making the change.
Thanks, I thought there might be something about XP Home.
He’s on his own; I don’t make house calls. 
I don’t think the Home edition should be making any difference; Home and Pro both handle the screen in the same way.
A possibility additional to those I have listed above is that some kind of malware has infected Word or one of the document templates, so it might be worth running a full virus/spyware check, but having said that, futzing the screen resolution isn’t really a typical behaviour of malware.
If it is some weird misconfiguration or bug in Word, it might be worth your friend visiting Microsoft Office Update (http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/). he will need to have the original installation media to hand for this and of course it will need to be a genuine licensed copy of Office
If you just want a fix, Powerstrip is an awesome utility that lets you do anything with your display settings possible. It is free to try and you can set up defaults and separate profiles for applications and stuff like that. It is a handy utility for most anyone really.
Just a guess, but does he have the latest driver for his display adapter? Have him check the device manager for the driver version, then check the manufacturer’s website for an update. Sometimes a newer driver will fix wonky problems like this.
I had something similar a few months back and the only way i found to correct it was a fresh install of XP. Tried replacing the card, the driver, repair installs, powerstrip utility…nothing worked.