I feel like an idiot here, I swear there's an easy solution I should know but just can't think of.

I've been using an old monitor that goes up to 1280x1024 but just now plugged in my 1280x800 HDTV. Unfortunately, it's not supposed to be used as a monitor, but I've been using it as one for almost a year now so it's not hurting the TV. However, I don't think it acts exactly like one, so vista has no idea that the resolution isn't working and I'm getting a black screen (all the sounds are going as if everything were normal)

If I boot at the lowest VGA resolution by using F8 it's fine and I can switch to 1280x800, but it doesn't remember that setting on reboot. I don't want to use f8 every time I boot windows, so what do I do? I wish there were some hotkey for downgrading your resolution, but I haven't been able to find one.

whoopsie daisies, problem solved. Carry on

well now you've got me all curious ... what was the solution?

Well for one I wanted 1280x720... durr...

It also turns out that for some reason my "monitor" isn't doing so well with resolution changes. On XP it would just adjust as it changed, now I have to power cycle the damn thing to get it to realize "oh, it's 720p still". It's pretty obnoxious and I wish it worked like it did in XP, but I can live with it.