As a requisite, I've gone through numerous articles (used Google extensively on my problem before asking) though I'm not able to solve my problem.
In the case of both my laptop (polycarbonate MacBook) and desktop (an aged Dell), Fedora Core, Ubuntu, and Slackware overshoot my native res by quite a bit, leaving me with a desktop far larger than my screen. I don't believe that I need to touch restricted drivers and my resolution is already set to native, the distros even recognize the correct system info (save for the distros on my MacBook running via Parallels).
The LiveCD's did not experience this issue - how do I alleviate my problem?