Only 1/4 of screen is active after reboot after external monitor

[bpaddock]

I have been running XFCE4 on laptop for sometime without issues.
I hooked up a large external TV to watch a video.
It took a few tries to get the laptop and external monitor to work together.
I eventually did.
It took even more effort to get things back to just using the laptop screen when I was done with the external monitor. Lots of messing with XRANDR etc.
This should not be this hard, to add and remove monitors where am I going wrong?

I did get the the laptop back to using its own screen at the correct resolution, until I rebooted.

Everything is fine until I exit the login screen. Login screen is fine.

When the desktop screen finally comes up (takes longer than I’d like, may just be slow hardware), only the top left quarter of the display is active. The other three quarters are just black. Using ARANDR/XRANDR is only changing the top left quarter as if the other three quarters do not exist.

What setting is controlling this screen quartering and how do I make this not happen again?

[brahma]

create a new test user, reboot, log in with the test user, and see if it has the same issue…

[bpaddock]

The new user works fine.

So how do I repair the broken user?

[brahma]

in your normal user home directory rename the:
.cache. to .cache.bak
and
.config. to .config.bak
reboot and see if it helped

[bpaddock]

Yes, renaming those fixed the 1/4 screen issue. Now I must reconfigure the desktop, not unexpectedly.

So what actually went wrong and how do I prevent in the future, please?

Plugging in an external monitor should not be damaging settings.

[brahma]

@bpaddock

Lots of messing with XRANDR

it was not only you plugging in a monitor, you were also doing xrandr stuff…
myabe renaming some xrandr or some display configs/folders in your .config folder would be enough…