The NVidia control panel applet does not show up when I'm logged into our remote machines with Remote Desktop, and launching it from the command line does not work either. These machines are thousands of km away and there is no physical access. I need to change the Vsync setting from Force on to Use 3D application setting, but I can't find where these settings are stored in the registry or wherever. How can I make this change?

The display adapter settings are commonly stored in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video . There are subkeys for each of your adapter.

Do note that when you connect to a remote desktop, it is not the host's actual GPU that is doing the rendering; a special software video driver sends the graphics to the terminal's rendering system. This is why the NVidia control panel doesn't work over the connection - the app doesn't see a NVidia adapter. Also, the vsync setting of the server's physical GPU has nothing to do with the vsync of the terminal server image.

Be sure that you don't break the registry - check the values on a local machine before deploying registry keys to a machine that you can't physically reach! And take backups before the adjustments! If you manage to stop the display adapter's drawing operations altogether, you will probably be knee-deep in sh*t.

Found it on a Vista 64 local machine, all I have here. Hoping on XP 32 it's the same. The entry is OGL_DefaultSwapInterval
The values for the three control panel settings don't seem to follow a logical order:
Force off: FF FF FF FF
Force on: 01 00 00 10
Application: 01 00 00 00
The other thing is all the settings are replicated in key 0000 and key 0001 and when I change it in the control panel, it changes in both places. I'm not sure what that is all about