Comment 30 for bug 988290

The problem may be deeper than gnome-screensaver. I experienced the same annoying symptom with a fresh install of Debian 7.0.0 on a machine behind an IOGear 8-port PS2 KVM switch. As reported above, simply opening System Settings -> Displays caused the resolution to revert to 1600x1200, as did running the xrandr command in a terminal. To determine if it was gnome-screensaver, I forced it to quit using 'gnome-screensaver-command --exit' and confirmed that the screensaver process was no longer running. However, switching to another machine for a few seconds still resulted in the display changing to 1024x768. Using Gnome Classic instead of Gnome shell didn't help. I did not remove gnome-screensaver because it required uninstalling other gnome desktop components also. My solution was to install the XFCE desktop which doesn't exhibit the resolution switching behavior -- and is more usable than Gnome3 in my opinion.