I haven't seen anything resembling the problem description, but in the interest of non-productive speculation:

Most flat panel displays, TFT and other, have a specific screen size and don't work well - sometimes don't work at all - with another screen size. My current laptop prefers ~1200x800 px and while I can get an image within a couple of steps from that it's not at all pleasant to look at. An older laptop refused to allow me to set display size to anything but the one size it wanted. My desktop flat screen runs best at 1280x1024, and accepts a different size a little better than the laptop, but still asserts its complaints if I get far from the preferred value.

The minimum screen size that many flat screen monitors can accept "gracefully" may be bigger than an older graphics card can provide. Since "delete the driver and reboot" is an almost ubiquitous procedure, it would be expected that any Win system should be able to default to a graphics driver that would give you some sort of display sufficient to reload and troubleshoot regardless of the monitor type connected, but Richard may have found a hardware combination where this doesn't work.

I was told once that a computer doesn't need to have a monitor in order to boot, but that was several decades ago and the SPGWK¹ who offered the advice couldn't explain:

how do you know it's booted without a monitor?

so I've never tried it out.

¹ SPGWK = Self-Proclaimed Genius/Geek With Keyboard = the most prevalent generic kind of "advisor" found on open-format "help blogs." (Does not, of course, include any of us here.)

John