In anticipation of not being able to find this info at any vendors, I'm skipping the aggravation and coming right here.
 
I just bought an Acer AL1917 widescreen LCD and everything it displays is distorted.  I have my desktop/video card res set to the monitor's native res of 1280 x 1024 (correction, the native res is 1440 x 900; I changed my desktop to this res and now everything's gone all pear-shaped).  There are no drivers for the monitor.  My video card is a Radeon 9500 Pro, which is apparently too old to have a setting for aspect ratio (I need 4:3, I guess).
 
If I can't find a cheap video card, I'm going to have to RMA the monitor.  Problem is, I don't know if newegg is going to let me exchange it for a 4:3 LCD They have one for approximately the same price, but its response time is 8ms instead of the 5 ms of the one I have now, which seems sluggish enough.
 
My question is, can I even find cards with support for setting aspect ratios without playing Russian roulette?  Doesn't sound like the sort of thing they list on shopping sites or even at manufacturer sites.  As long as the card performs as well as my Radeon (which I am otherwise satisfied with - not a gamer so my only use is 3d graphics, and not the heavy stuff), supports the aspect ratio setting, and is cheap as dirt, I'm happy.
 
Suggestions?

Any modern card will support 16x10 aspect ratio without question.  
 
Some of it relies on drivers not for the video card, but for the monitor. Did you put in the CD that came (?) with your monitor in order to get it working properly? If not, Samsung and Gateway and Dell LCD monitors come with driver disks for older cards.

Thanks for the reply, but I figured it out with the help of another forum.  I had the native res wrong (I was using AL1917's native res, not AL1017w's).  Once I set that, and the monitor's max res under the Displays tab, everything works fine.
 
And no, no drivers on the disc that came with the monitor.  The only thing on the disc was a quickstart manual and a user's manual.