lol, try playing with hdrish in a subspace node mission. Talk about hurting your eyes there. Anyway, idk, if you absolutely can't figure out what's making the lasers too bright and other stuff. Install new graphics drivers for your card, and if not even then, save you're flag settings and profiles for fs2 and then use the installer to do a fresh install (crude ways sometimes help alleviate problems). And then you'll know what's going on. After that, profiles have been known to not look any different with new flag settings until you make a new profile.
But with fso it shouldn't be hard to deduce what's going wrong. The fresh install idea might get rid of a rogue file that might causing the high brightness that you didn't know about or find the location of it.