There's something that's been bugging me for a while, and yet I have yet to get around to fixing the issue unless it's a thing. I've searched to no avail with what I could come up with, so here I post:

What is up with the fact that the game persists with changing the display settings on my desktop?

I have heard some rumors of what may be causing it, but I have no seen any solution on preventing it from happening. I can only undo it with restarting my machine, which is annoying. I only know of another game that does this, but also hadn't been bothered to fix that either (it's an old game anyway, so there would be less of a chance I can do anything about it).

One of the rumors I have heard of through a Reddit thread was that it was the gamma that messes it up. Here's the weird thing - it didn't matter that the gamma was either brightened or darkened. The screen gets brightened nonetheless. I'm not using a graphics card, so don't suggest any control panel of the sort that isn't going to apply because I have no such thing. I'm only using the Intel graphics chipset which frankly doesn't even have an effect. It doesn't affect my game, it just unnecessarily affects my computer.

Is there any real fix to this, or should I just suffer with the gluttony of this abuse?

Which chipset exactly? Read the minimum requirements:

https://www.gog.com/game/the_witcher

Is your chip affected?

Intel as a control panel. In display chek Maintain Aspect Ratio and at the bottom check Override application settings.

Read my post. My question has nothing to do with compatibility issues nor is it an issue with the game itself. It's a residual effect after I exit the game which other people have had issues with. Not even that worked. Problem persists.