Well, on the off chance anyone ever experiences this problem, i'm gonna post how i fixed it just to save you some trouble.
I had two selections in the video setup for ah, and both were identical, they looked like this "NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE \ Microsoft Direct3D Hardware acceleration through Direct3D HAL"
And that is the one stated in the video7.cfg file in the settings folder too.
So i installed AH2 again, just to check what that cfg file would look like, cause it starts on the correct monitor, and it said "DVNVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE"
So i exchanged them put DVNVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE in the config7.cfg and now all is golden.
I dont understand why AH would put that in the config files though, its done that the last 5 or so times i've installed it. even after i formated my harddrive and installed fresh, go figure.
anyhow, problem solved, case closed.