Comment 2 for bug 433289

I see the same thing. In my case it is because gnome-settings-daemon is changing my screen resolution for me at login time. Xsplash doesn't seem aware that the screen geometry has changed and just remains its original size.

In my case this looks much worse: not only am I activating a second screen, but the first one changed to a much higher resolution. Only about 1/4 of the first screen has the xsplash window displayed, the rest of the display area shows my background image tiled (which looks bad). Eventually Nautilus receives its own signal about the screen resize event and fixes that for me, but for about 5 seconds things look pretty lame.