I have a laptop in a dock with an external monitor. In Fedora 18, I configured it use the external monitor as the primary display and to turn the laptop screen off.

The machine in question has the following configuration:

HP EliteBook 8560p Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2620M CPU @ 2.70GHz 8GB RAM ATI Radeon 6400M Docking Station with 1920x1080 monitor (connected via DVI) and wired network. Fedora 19 64-bit

If I create a new user, I can log into the new user just fine. I see both monitors with the laptop screen being primary. If I change it so that the external monitor is primary and the laptop screen is off, I can reboot and login just fine. After I customize the desktop a bit, when I reboot and login, I get a blank screen with a mouse pointer, but it never goes any further.

I've seen comments about changing the display manager to either kdm or lightdm, but neither of those helped. It still behaved the same. I even found a comment about logging in to a text system (no display manager) and using 'startx' to start the desktop. I tried that, but it still behaved the same.

Is there some way I can regain control of the user?

Is there a way I can reactivate the laptop screen without using the Display applet in the gnome-control-center?

Craig