This isn't a good answer, but it might get you headed in a direction to figure it out.
My last laptop had an external monitor connected, and the Intel drivers would often be confused about the orientation of the secondary after a reconnect or a reboot. I got tired of dealing with that and tried to fix it programatically because the clicks were too many in the GUI. Select this monitor, select rotation, select other monitor, select rotation, apply, arrange, apply, wait...
I spent about a day on it (ahh, the days of being an employee vs. self-employed!) and the solution I found was to use a program to compare the registry (regshot perhaps?) to discover what keys were involved in the correction (what they were before versus what they were after) and then there was an intel-provided exe that forced the driver to reset based on the registry-- the exe was essentially like pressing the "apply" button in the gui. I was running XP and if I recall, the gui management was for configuration of the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator Driver for Windows XP as well. So the final solution became a cmd file on my desktop that would apply a REG without confirmation and then run an exe with some parameters.
Now, I don't have that laptop (they didn't let me walk out the door with it when I quit!) and I do not remember the specifics on the exe that was required to do the reset. Just changing registry keys didn't spontaneously cause it to take effect-- there was an api call involved, which I just handled with their exe. I know that isn't a lot to go on, but something tells me the file was in the driver package, or somewhere on the drive already, and I just found it. Running it at the command line gave options. Like /reset.
I hope that helps you a little. Be sure to post back if you figure it out.
Also post back if I'm completely mistaken and it didn't happen like this at all. But that's the way I remember it. :)