Screen image distorted.

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I'm working on a friend's computer right now and have hit a brick wall. Every time I reboot the comptuer, the screen adjusts to "stretch" wider than it should be. Either the right or left side of the screen will extend past the edge of the monitor. The video drivers are up to date and I've checked all the settings. The screen resolution is 1440 x 900 (the monitor's native resoultion). Once in Windows, if I set the resolution to something lower, then change it back, it is fine. I really don't know what to do. I've tried Googling everything I can think of.
Here are the specs:

Gateway GT5404
Pentium D 915
1GB RAM
Intel GMA 950
Gateway FPD1975W Monitor, 1440 x 900 resolution, using VGA input

Anybody have any ideas?

at this point I would check the settings on the monitor.

just sayin'

Try the monitor on another computer

Might be an issue with the driver not using the correct refresh rate upon boot-up. After you change settings, then it uses the correct rate. Some monitors will tell you this information in the on-screen display--make a note of the horizontal and vertical frequencies in the faulty mode and correct mode. If they're different between modes, almost certainly a driver issue. If they're the same, suspect a defective monitor.

You might also try doing a "factory reset" on the monitor--might be an option for this in one of the on-screen menus. Then readjust as necessary and see if that solves the problem.

Is the screen distorted at the BIOS boot screen? Since you are using VGA cable, the monitor has to guess the sampling rate and since 16:10 aren't exactly common for that interface, it may have a tendency to guess wrong. Do you have another cable that you can test with? It sometimes helps.
Otherwise, you can try using this or this to change the screen resolution automatically at startup. Not very elegant but it's worth a try.

Well, I plugged the monitor into my wife's laptop and it seemed to work fine. After plugging it back into the original machine and rebooting several times, the problem still hasn't come back. Before, whenever the Windows login screen would come up, the monitor go into an auto-adjust mode and flicker and then settle into it's distorted ratio. Now it doesn't do that at all and everything seems fine. Weird, but it seems to have fixed itself.
This computer actually doesn't even have a DVI port. I wish I still had an extra graphics card to put in it (it belongs to a friend of my wife's). All of my spare parts have slowing been delt out to various friends and family as I fix their computers. I still have an ample supply of PATA and SATA cables though.