I had a suse enterprise (yeah right) machine freak out a display all the time. It really really wanted a super high resolution. Even in the boot (F2) text mode. Not sure if that is the default or just a mis install. The remedy is easy once you know what to tweak. In /grub/conf/menu.lst the default line had a screen entry like vga=0x31a
Once I changed that to vga=0x317 the whole thing looks much nice.