Over the last few boots I've seen letters which don't appear correctly - once it was e's (all e's) which were less than half there (only the upper curve appeared), more recently 3's only partly appeared - both during boot and regular use in the CLI. Yes, it's not always the same letter(s) which are corrupted.

There's also been a green capital 'D' appearing, usually in the upper-left quandrant which stays there as I merrily execute commands around it. Today a 2nd 'D' (also capital and green) appeared nearer to the center of the screen also while in CLI. Huh?!

After booting today I also had the system take several minutes (literally) from the time I typed in "emacs" at the CLI to the time where it actually appeared on screen. It seems the same brain drain happens when I try to bring the system back from sleep (black screen) - but I wasn't patient enough to give it 5 minutes to return (or not) and just did a hardware bounce (tried the restart button but that didn't work so I had to power down - LiLan case).

So my guess is that this could be due to any of the following:
1) byte problem during boot - a set of bits gets lost for the font or truncated when loaded.
2) someone else is doing this for me
3) bad copy of RH 8.0
4) more badness from updating from RH7.2 to RH8.0 (only had 7.2 installed for a couple light weeks of use)
5) rogue process
6) Linux or Red Hat just does this sometimes.
7) something else.

The only thing I've done today is to change the ipchains file so I could use DNS, but the severe slowdown started before getting to the editor, so I'm curious what others would attribute this to, and how I can fix it.

Of course. After booting I'm not getting either problem. This time. Grrrr...