system-config-display crashes (F12)

[Markus Lindholm]

When I try to run system-config-display as root I get the following

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/system-config-display/xconf.py", line 378, in <module>
    dialog = xConfigDialog.XConfigDialog(hardware_state, xconfig,
videocard.VideoCardInfo())
  File "/usr/share/system-config-display/xConfigDialog.py", line 640,
in __init__
    if len(self.xconfig.layout[0].adjacencies) > 1:
IndexError: index out-of-bounds

The background is that this morning when I came to my desktop machine
I didn't get a password screen from the screensaver, so I rebooted. It
booted fine and I got a login screen and it accepted my login but I
didn't get a proper gnome desktop. All I got was a blue background
(the standard one) and the possibility to right click -> cŕeate a new
folder -> open up the file-browser -> find gnome-terminal and so I
could start applications in X but I had no desktop, i.e. no panels or
menus and so forth.

I thought perhaps installing nvidia drivers from rpm fusion instead
would help. That was a non-starter, I didn't even get X. So I erased
those packages.

At that point I also thought of disconnecting my second monitor that
had been blank all morning, and that did the trick of getting back my
desktop, but at that point the resolution of my screen had dropped to
800x600 and now I don't seem to have any means to set it back

Any advice?
Markus