Some time last year, during transition between computers, I used Gmail from a library terminal running IE 7.x on Windows Enterprize 2003. I remember distictly being asked to choose a default view for Gmail, and I settled on "Basic HTML" as the most appropriate one for the location.
Fast forward several months, I have a brand new laptop, use Gmail in another view, but can not get rid of it opening up in the old BasicHTML, and at its lowest common denominator font size. This is how it looks on Safari 3.2.1/OSX 10.5.7 (I substituted a less private folder in place of Inbox for the purpose of this demo): http://i41.tinypic.com/wv7qc2.png

This is how I'd like it to open, preferably already in 18p size, rather than the common no-size set conditions: http://i41.tinypic.com/25syirs.png
[Images may have been scaled down by tinypic and/or BG Forum]

There doesn't seem to be a setting just for this. Short of nuking all cookies, is there anything I can do to make Gmail rewrite the setting and launch in my chosen default view/font size hereafter?

How are you accessing gmail?
Do you have JavaScript and cookies enabled?

To force basic (html) view use this: https://mail.google.com/mail/h

To force standard (js) view try this: http://mail.google.com/mail?nocheckbrowser
It may be slower and require enabling JavaScript and cookies.

I have, of course, both JS and cookies enabled, and a modern standards-compliant browser. Now that you say it, I do have a trailing "/mail/h/?" at the end of the url-autocompletion string that comes up each time I invoke Gmail from scratch. Possibly that's it. Thanks.