Hi Spooks,

Long time no hear I hope your okay and welcome back to Quake.I'm sure Baker or one ofthe guru's will jump in here but in the interim I wonder if this has got something to do with your startup paramaters. Have you tried adding something like the following to your command line to try and constrain the appearance...
Code:
-width 640 -height 480
this can probably all be handled in game these days but you never now, it might be worth a try

Hope this helps

Monty