OK, not a question as I have already found a solution for the problem, but in case anybody else is using a Matrox card and uses the MGA driver they can hopefully use this solution and avoid the headache I went through today (It's a good thing I shave my head. Saved myself a lot of pain from pulling my hair out over KDE icons).

If you upgrade your system to any distro that uses the latest xorg and you are using the MGA driver, you won't be able to run X. The drivers don't work with some of the API changes the xorg folks have made. You can either find a new card to use or install X from a prior version. I am using Fedora 9 now, but what is necessary should be the same for any distro just how it is done will be different. Obviously, I don't know about package names for other distros.

Download the following from the prior release into a single empty directory:
mesa-libGL, rhpxl, xorg-x11-drv-fbdev, xorg-x11-drv-keyboard, xorg-x11-drv-mouse, xorg-x11-drv-vesa, xorg-x11-drv-void, xorg-x11-server.

Then force install them (again, I don't know how in non rpm based distro's, but in fedora):
X should work now.

ALSO, if you attempted to get X working with the drivers from tuxx-home and it dropped you into 640x480 w/ 256 colors, and you are running KDE, it will cache any icon you use in 16 colors (may do the same for gnome as well, I don't know but the fix should work if it does). Later, when you get things working you will not have nice shiny icons, you will have ugly ones.

I'm sure there is a more elegant way to fix this, but I couldn't find anything to clear the cache or even where the cache was. I even booted to single user, move my home directory and created a new one, removed everything under /tmp and then rebooted. Still had the icons cached.

Anyway, if someone can post how to clear the icon cache, that should also fix it, but if not, just touch all the files under /usr/share/icon (again, this may be a different location for a different distro).

HTH

Forrest