video problems on startup causing driver corruption

About three years ago, on my home system I had a problem with a GeForce card
(and still do, just have learned how to live it), and now I'm encountered
something similar-looking at work, with a GeForce MX 100/200 (bios version
3.11.01.24.00) (on Windows 2000 as well as XP). What I discovered on the
home system is: If, when you power on the PC, you wait too long to power on
the monitor (more than just a couple of seconds, really), when the boot
sequence gets to where it's about to display the desktop, the monitor just
goes dark, and drops into standby. But if that isn't weird enough, you
cannot just reboot and fix the problem. All boots after that will behave the
same way (especially annoying since it's hard to even do a shutdown). Fixing
the problem requires reinstalling the drivers--which is easy enough to do,
but a major hassle at first when you don't know what's going on.

Now I'm seeing something similar here at work. Different PC, different video
card (don't remember the model # on the home system, but can easily check it
if someone wants to know) running Windows 2000. Something happened, not
quite sure what, but the video would die when it was time for the desktop,
and reinstalling drivers fixed it.

Apparently something went wrong and caused the drivers to get corrupted, and
I couldn't do a normal boot until I reinstalled the drivers.

How is information communicated back to the card as to whether the monitor
is on? Everyone I talk to seems to agree that this is a really strange
problem, but now I've seen it on two different video cards.

(Please feel free to e-mail me if I don't check this newsgroup real soon
after a posted reply.)