FYI - i found the issue. I really wasnt having any trouble with the ATI card or drivers. My error was just plain dumb. I had the problem with microscopic fonts in KDE so i added the -dpi 96 to the Start_X_Wrapper.sh for pluto. The problem was that i added the option to the client side of the line rather than the server side of xinit. I got stuck in the loop of x restarting because the wrapper was unable to launch the environment with the malformed command so then it would try to re-init my display settings and overwrite my xorg.conf. I fixed my placement for the dpi option, replaced my xorg.conf, then reinstalled the display driver from scratch and the display is working beautifully since.