strange display when shutting down or logging out of desktop
 

I did an ftp install of SuSE 9.0, and I'm very happy with it. One problem I'm having that I can't figure out is when I shut down. Whenever the desktop manager shuts down, my screen appears to melt. Random sheets of color converge on the screen until it's a uniform nasty green. If I log out, it happens before I get to the login prompt. If I shut the computer down, it does this and then shuts down normally. The system is a Dell Latitude with an ATI Rage Mobility card. I originally had a problem with the X display having a large gap near the top of the screen and the mouse pointer being inaccurate, but this was fixed when I switched from the 'ati' to the 'vesa' driver.

I've tried it with Gnome, KDE and IceWM, so I suspect it's a problem with X.

I have seen similar effects from old crappy trident video cards. An associate I and came to the conclusion it was leftover crap in the video memory that the driver X uses was/is not flushing correctly and vomits it out on the screen during the change between gui and text modes. The cards are at least functional (we have tons) so we have not taken the time to find a solution if one exists, I just hope the monitors are not being damaged in some way. With some of the really bad cards that have video memory chips missing out of the sockets, leaving them with only 1mb, gaps and sometimes only half an X gui will show on the screen. If X cannot map a full screen in the video memory it seems likely the corresponding pointer positions would be affected also. -Not much help, but I hope this may help to clarify the effect.