Like the topic says, when I start my N900 the Hildon desktop appears in a reduced size. It's hard to believe that I'm the first to see this weird issue, but I can't find anything about it in the forums. Perhaps it's just because keywords like "display" and "shrink" and "size" and the others I tried searching on yield way too many posts about other sizes of other things (usually storage space).

Anyway, when I power up the N900, the desktop appears reduced to about 70-80% of its normal size. Other than being too small, it looks normal. The surrounding area is black, with the reduced desktop in the center. It's a little hard to use, of course, since the digitizer doesn't shrink down with the desktop: you have to click where the target should appear at full size, not where it really is. I've got Optimize n900 installed, and it has a button at the top of the power button menu, so I can pretty easily click that and it will restart the Hildon desktop everything will be ok. Why this works on restart but not on start is a puzzle to me. This is a relatively recent development, so it must be something I did (changed, installed, removed, deleted, edited).

If anyone has any hints or has seen this discussed before and can point me to the correct keywords (or topic) I appreciate it. Luckily, the N900 doesn't need to be shut down and restarted much, but I'd still like to know how I got into this situation.

1st- Get alot of bandage gauze.
2nd- You can't do this yourself you need help from a friend here..
Get them to wrap up and bind your hands painfully tightly...
3rd- Leave wrapped for 10 years

Results should be tiny tiny tiny hands that hopefully will accommodate your odd new tiny screen situation.

Eggnog and rum induced humour aside...
This is by far the weirdest bug yet I've ever seen.
I do hope it isn't contagious and naturally I do hope for your own sanity it is figured out.

That really sounds weird.
And I never heard about it, too. Sorry.

Sometimes, under heavy load (swap clearing/changing), I observe similar display (only) behaviour when switching from menu to desktop / vice versa. But that keeps just a few seconds and then shows everything normal.
Is everything affected? I mean are also apps and menu affected? Or only the desktop?

btw: I have seldom a glitch with notifiers (yellow pop up) messages. They appear and on fading out they leave a blurred area where I cannot see what is behind (display area got blocked). Restarting all hildon- processes do not resolve, only a reboot helps.
As this is similar I would appreciate every input...

That happens very rarely under still not clear conditions. I suspect a transition landscape->portrait while h-d is still not fully initialized is what triggers the bug, but I have never been able to recreate it. A reboot with kbd open restores the normal behaviour.

I think I've gotten this before, and a reboot fixed mine

Yes, exactly as FMG said it.

Same thing with me too. Rarely happens, but annoying as hell. Reboot is your friend.

A would likely also work via SSH if you have auto-connect on a Wi-Fi network. Unfortunately I set up my home WiFi as WPA-Enterprise, which does not allow auto-connect on N900.

Since I knew that one thing the OptimizeN900 script did was to kill hildon-desktop and allow it to restart, I was certainly glad I'd enabled its power button menu item. Easy to click the top button in portrait view -- even if the button doesn't line up with the resistive digitizer I know where the top of the display should be. Getting to the terminal -- or any given application -- is tricky with the scale translation problen.

Since it usually -- but not always -- happens on cold start, rarely happens on "unexpected reboot" and never seems to occur when restarting hildon-desktop by killing it, I have to wonder if a race condition problem exists. Not as in a "man's inhumanity to man" thing, but the order that tasks and processes start and finish under different circumstances. Will try a cold start with keyboard open to see what happens.

If I find out anything else interesting, I'll post. Thanks all for the ideas.

Remember that you can press Ctrl + Shift + X to open xterm

Really odd bug tho, never had it.