This lasted from yesterday at seven pm until today at eight pm. Since then, I've given one of the monitors to a co-worker, and have taken the new challenge of getting the one(!) dvi fed dell 2001fp working with this laptop. It took another hour to get that working just right. Now I have three device and three screen sections to deal with the vga out, the dvi out and hypothetically the LCD out (though using the lcd out results in the laptop screen turning on, but nothing else.) All of these operate independant of eachother. Next step . . . Dual head setup. What good is a few (5.5!) inches of space when you can't use the 14 inches you already have! Shenanigans I tell you.
That is my next task. Soon I will be updating my site with the most up to date xorg.conf file I have.
Sites that helped:
http://theorie.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/~arwagner/computer/T41p/
http://thinkwiki.org
http://linux-thinkpad.org