The Mystery of the Expanding Desktop

[buster]

An eerie event had this grizzled Linux user flummoxed for a few days. Fortunately, serendipity waltzed in and shone a beacon of light through the dark and stormy night...... (Play appropriately menacing music.)

I was doing an update on my Mint 19 installed system, and playing a game at the same time. So once i awhile I used the keyboard. (A clue!) After the update, I muttered inappropriate things at my Mint, because the desktop was very large, way larger than the monitor. As my cursor went left, the desktop slide behind the cursor to the right. Same with up and down. I thought I might need Gravol. So.....

Attempt #1. Go to preferences and check resolution. Weird. It shows correct.
Attempt #2. Try combinations of of Alt/Ctrl and + - keys to shrink it. No luck.
Attempt #3. Rip Mint off the hd and install something else. Tempting, but something I'm not in the mood to do right now.
Attempt #4. Google the problem. The results I found would bring tears to your eyes, people wandering around in a giant landscape with no hope of escape. Saw this a few times, "I tried every one of the suggested solutions and none of them worked!"
Attempt #5. Go to bed and forget about it.

A day or two later I was back in Mint and looking for a program that was entirely unrelated to my problem and saw something, and instantly recognized the source of my misfortune - a program for users who have vision problems called 'Accessibility'. And we can deduce in retrospect that there are keyboard strokes that allow this program to be controlled from the keyboard.

Indeed, the shrinking was dead easy, and I have lived happily ever after.

Another case cleverly closed by Inspector Buster.

[ssfc72]

Very good to know!  Thanks for the info, Buster. :-)

[fox]

I see that you haven't lost your storytelling ability ... yet. 

[Jason]

Just in case anybody is reading this in Recent Posts section, there is an imagine below which expresses my sentiment entirely, only because I've done similar things playing a game, but in Windows. I kept turning on sticky keys.