Doh!

I was looking at the wrong culprit.
I backed up my Mandrake 8 partition and reinstalled.  The display was OK in 
all its 1280-pixel -widesplendor.
Then I re-ran LILO from Mandrake 9.1 (because this is where I had my modified 
lilo.conf file.)
The problem returned!
I decided that I should run LILO from the Mandrake 8 partition instead.  Lo 
and behold, as I was merging the new lilo.conf file with the old, I 
discovered a statement:
vga=normal
And in the Mandrake 9.1 entries:
vga=0788 (not sure of the number.)
So this vga setting is apparently something only Mandrake pays heed to, 
because Red Hat and Lindows were fine without the second statement.
I reran LILO without the offending vga statements, and Mandrake 8 came up 
fine, without the nasty 640x480 resolution problem.
So, I assume the effect of vga=normal is to somehow munge the execution path 
so the newer version of XFree86 doesn't come up from startx.  (I tried 
running it locally, and the version was 4.0.3, so I know the newer version 
was still there.)  It's puzziling to me where the old XFree86 is, as 
"whereis" doesn't find it.  Or maybe it's something the new XFree86 brings up 
if you set the appropriate environment variable.

In any case, thanks for the suggestions.

Vaughn
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