This is coming up quite a bit, and I really want to get better graphics drivers before making a distributable full recovery solution on a USB stick, however if you want to you can use a USB CDROM drive to install Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, probably others) and then edit the xorg.conf file from the command line (ctrl+alt+F1 to get to the console, log on then do something like sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf and find the screen section. Change the display subsection for Depth 24 (which is true colour no point using anything else these days) and make it look something like this:
SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
Modes “1024×600″ “800×600″ “640×480″
EndSubSection
The important bit is 1024×600 as the first resolution.
Here is my xorg.conf file which you can download, stick on a USB or something and overwrite the one that gets put there by the installer. If you get to a command line and have a wired network plugged in then you can do
wget http://webbookblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/xorg.conf
to download it to your current directory.
If you want to reinstall Ubuntu, or try any other Linux the don’t go calling support and expecting them to help! This is totally unsupported, and not recommended by me unless you know what you are doing (or at least you think you do 
) but if you get stuck you can ask me for help and I will try as best I can to help.