scrambled video screen "sometimes" on login. old fedora 6 core system on laptop

Hi, need some advice here. trying to bring an old, old, laptop back to life for a little data logger system I'm configuring. It's dual-boot, Win XP & Fedora 6.0.52, last version that runs on this old hardware. Sometimes the video is scrambled upon user mode login to fedora, not during boot though. Restarting in XP, then restarting again in fedora generally fixes this issue. So I'm guessing that something is not initialized in the video hardware when starting fedora. This is on an old HP NW8000 laptop,the video card is "ATI RV350 [mobility radeon 9600 m10], the display is "lcd panel 1440 * 900". To make it more interesting, I have not seen this issue when logging in as "root" after bootup, only when logging in as a regular user...further interesting tidbit: the display settings box for root says this is 1600 * 1200, thousands of colors. Seems odd for a 1440 * 900 lcd! Anyone remember enough ancient history to shed light on this?
Thanks,
Bill M