Starting XWindows (KDE or Gnome) under Microsoft virtual PC 2007 sp1

X normally configures itself to use 24 bit screen depth when installed under virtual PC 2007. This causes it to display a corrupted unreadable image.
To overcome this, the X config file needs to be updated to use 16 bit color depth

How to do this? Try the below steps

1. If you are are currently seeing a garbled screen, press Ctrl-Alt-F2 to switch to a text console and login as root
2. Edit the config file using a text editor (vi shown below) and change depth from 24 to 16.
   vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
   locate section "Screen" and change DefaultDepth & also Depth under SubSection "Display". Make sure these are set as 16
3. Once the config changes are saved, restart X. This can be done by switching back using keys Ctrl-Alt-F7 (if you came from Step 1) and then once seeing the garbled screen, using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace . You can also try rebooting the system with the reboot command
   

This normally woks with KDE or Gnome on various distributions running under Microsoft virtual pc 2007 sp1