Windows 7 won't start up in wide screen

I just bought a new computer with Windows 7 64 bit home edition and an ATI Radeon 5700 series graphics card. My monitor is my semi-old 19" tv - an Element FLX-1910.

First, it will not boot up with HDMI even though both the graphics card and the tv have an hdmi port and the tv is hdmi ready. I get an error message after the "windows is starting up" screen ( you can actually see that on the screen) that states "unsupported mode" (the tv gives that error) even though the "mode" is hdmi which is supposed to be supported. After this, the screen goes black and you can not do anything else other than force a shut down of your computer and plug in your VGA cord.

Which brings me to the next problem: When I start up under VGA, it does start up with no problems - thankfully - but it's not in widescreen mode. You have to go to screen resolution each time and extend the display and mess around with the settings to get the picture to stretch to fit the screen. Once it does that, it will stay that way until the computer is powered down. However, once you start up again, it goes back to the "square" mode and has a black space on the left of the screen and it's not stretched and will stay that way until you manually stretch it by messing with the display settings.

I can not seem to get the computer to save the "stretch" mode and I also can not find a driver for the out-of-date element tv. All other drivers are up to date.

Anyone know what I can do about either of these problems?

Please advise, thanks.