E6400 external monitor scaling

I've had Windows 7x64 running on my E6400 (w 160m) for 4 months now and frequently use an external monitor (Dell E207FP widescreen 1680x1050). Up until a few days ago, I could plug the monitor in and it would correctly and automatically scale my desktop to the native 1680x1050 resolution.

All of a sudden (with no driver updates on my part) I can no longer scale any output to this resolution via VGA cable. I examined the device manager and found that the video driver date was not the Oct09 driver I had expected, but instead something from Jun09. Updated the driver to the most recent dated Dec-14-09 and I am still having the same scaling issue.

Just wasted 2 hrs online reading about it and trying various fixes such as "create custom resolution" in the Nvidia Control Panel with various refresh rates, but to no avail. Anyone else have this problem over VGA?

 

Did you try a simple driver rollback by any chance?

 

Did you wipe all the remains of the old driver? With driversweeper ot something?
And what do you mean exactly by scaling? I always set everything to "not scale" in the nvidia panel, scaling would actually enlarge the smaller res to a larger screen without increasing the resolution.