Monitor settings blow away during boot-up

[snaproll]

During boot-up, the text goes flying by and after 'Run level 5', it switches the monitor settings, the screen blanks and comes back a few times, then a colored 'horizontal tearing' screen comes up and there is no way to see anything to try to recover. I made 3 different CDs from 3 sources and they all get the same result, so I suspect the boot-up auto detected wrong, my video setup. (Which is stock on board video- no card) Will any boot option fix it, or are they superceded by autodetection ?

The computer is a stock Pentium 3, 1 ghz IBM, a pVR350 TV card, (Running KnoppMyth just fine on the HD..) and a 200g hard drive.
The setup button on the monitor says it's been switched to 68 hz v and 100 hz h, way higher than usual....

[UnderScore]

It sounds like knoppix is doing the best it can at autodetecting the video hardware (perhaps getting it wrong) & then setting a resolution & refresh rate that is beyond the capabilities of the hardware. Try booting knoppix with some Cheat Codes, such as:
knoppix screen=800x600 xvrefresh=60
knoppix screen=640x480 xvrefresh=60

I hope this helps.
James