Can't detect some external displays with Macbook Pro 17"

My macbook pro 17" connects just fine to my Apple Cinema display. But twice now I've tried to use it for presentations where I am connecting to either a video projector or a plasma screen through some sort of switchbox installed in the room. There's a VGA cable I'm supposed to connect to, and I use my DVI-VGA adaptor for that. But the macbook never recognizes the external monitor. In one case, everytime I hit "detect displays" i would see a brief bit of noise on the external screen like it was about to connect, but then nothing -- and Display Preferences showed no evidence of any connected external monitor. In both cases, I know the host systems generally handle Macs just fine. Is there something different about a Macbook Pro with dual-DVI? A design flaw or a mysterious switch that needs to be set right? Or maybe there's a glitch in my specific macbook??

Have you tried resetting PRAM…
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238
… ?

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Can't detect some external displays with Macbook Pro 17"

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