So I recently had a rather unpleasant conference experience. I plugged my old Ti PowerBook into the supplied projector. The PowerBook found the projector and made the projector the main display. Unfortunately, the projector just gave a blue screen. I needed to reset the resolution. OK, fine, except the menu bar, dock and all icons are now in the blue. I unplug the PowerBook from the projector: nada, nothing, no change, zippo -- the PowerBook still seems to think it is talking to the projector. I hate to say it, but for the first and only time in my many years of Mac ownership, I thought, "If this were a PC, I could hit one of the function keys and my problem would be solved." I could not think of a decent solution on the spot, so I wound up doing a forced restart. It took forever, all in front of a couple of hundred people. Never again...
Anyway, here's my fix: I wrote this simple script
tell application "System Preferences"
activate
set current pane to pane "com.apple.preference.displays"
end tell
tell application "System Events"
tell process "System Preferences"
click button "Detect Displays" of group 1 of ¬
tab group 1 of window "Color LCD"
end tell
end tell
Then, using Key Xing (there are other applications you could use), I set Shift-F12 to run the script from anywhere. This would have fixed my problem after I unplugged the projector ... BTW, if anyone from Apple is listening, the Keyboard Shortcuts pane in 10.3 is a sick joke. I should have been able to set this up with a couple of mouse clicks. Grrr...
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031223024020382