After several hours of slapping myself on the forehead and saying "Oh, duh!", I'm hoping that I can do the same with this problem.
It seems as though I have everything configured correctly, except when xdm starts, the display appears as if it has no vertical hold. Keep in mind that this is a laptop with an LCD screen. Are there any magic parameters that I have to specify during configuration? I've been running 'dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86', and it otherwise seems fine. dave...

