Well done. It was also said before in the thread that I initially linked to. Give yourself a pat on the back and a chocolate medal. 👍
I figured, seeing as there were three threads active on the first page alone regarding various issues with 1080i display, that it'd be better if everyone having issues was all discussing it in the same place and thus you can all help one another, (Hey, that's an idea, maybe we should have a discussion forum for this sort of thing! Oh, wait a moment, look at where we are! Magic that!

) instead of spread randomly over 3 different threads, and I thought I'd introduce the old thread link in here so that you don't all spend time reinventing the wheel, so to speak.
I've no idea what's wrong with
theotherspongey's setup, however, as a technical guy by trade, if she's saying that it has worked in the past, something logically has now changed which is stopping it from working. In my ordinary job, I'd try to solve this by obtaining as much information as possible so that we could deduce what has changed and how to fix it, anything to save a "site visit", however, as I've no intention of flying half-way round the world to have a look at what setup she's got, I'm relying on as detailed an account as possible to try and help out, along with input from everyone else. If everyone seems to be in agreement, then we're probably right, (or at least collectively wrong!

) so there's no harm in posting something which backs up someone else's point, and you shouldn't be upset by that.
Myself, I still use an old 28" widescreen CRT that's not capable of 1080i output, but I do use a component cable and can display 480p. It's kind of annoying in that the display size changes going from menus to race events as the game switches back between "normal 4:3" image and "480p 16:9" display and I then have to use the TV remote to resize the image back into widescreen mode, but at least it gets rid of those "shakes" that happen in normal mode usually in 2 or 3 places per lap that're awfully distracting.
I do have to ensure that the TV channel is selected as "Component", and that the Browser settings on the PS2 are configured for "YCrCb" output and not standard "RGB", so this is something else you can look out for, as it's only console dependent, not game or TV input dependent. <--- It also mentions this in the thread I linked to, so I was hoping that people would've read it there rather than having to cover it in here again.
It's also worth bearing in mind that in addition to selecting 480p or 1080i output that the screen setting should be configured to 16:9 and not 4:3 otherwise it'll make no difference.
Anyway hope some of this helps and no-one else is offended that I've repeated stuff other people have said before, we're just trying to get
vegamarks &
theotherspongey up and running as quickly and painlessly as possible. 👍