Comment 13 for bug 321224

before the bug report (then I fount the nvidia-settings method), I used to recenter the screen like this:
1) bring down resolution to 1024x768 (causing gnome-settings-daemon to crash....this still happens)
2) bring up resolution to 1280x800 (without any effect)
3) manually restart gnome-settings-daemon from terminal (which applies the previous setting)

and with this method xrandr complies about Xlib missing on display 0 or something similar, but now I'm not able to reproduce this error, I'll try on next reboot without touching nvidia-settings.

following screen captures attached (sorry for the bad quality, I have only a camera phone):