I've tried all that and then some, nothing works, I'm begining to think it's just the monitor, it is a rather old vga monitor. It run on a 30 htz refresh cycle instead of 60 so I believe it's part of the problem.

So I've simply installed red-hat 9 and I'm going to try and re-install knoppix back into a seperate partiition to ry and finish getting worked out after I can get another monitor.