I know this will sound crazy, but I've searched over the net and here at LQ and can't seem to find an answer as to why this is happening. I'll lay out some of the basics first.

I've got two Nvidia video cards, one FX5200 with 256MB of RAM and the other a GeForce4 MX with 64MB of RAM. I recently chucked my old ATI after getting frustrated with the lack of driver support from them..... but, I digress
here's where it gets interesting........

I downloaded and installed the drivers from nVidia, everything was working grandly, and I decided to go ahead and upgrade my pitiful two button mouse to an optical wheel mouse. After doing so, I set about modifying my XF86Config to support the wheel mouse.
After typoing IMPS/2 to read IPMS/2. I tried to start X and it failed, telling me what was wrong.... parse error on line 52, etc. etc. etc.
After opening my /etc/X11/XF86Config in jed, I was shocked to discover that it was complete html, I mean a well coded page too!! I won't post the contents here, as it was not for young eyes, but I can also tell you, it didn't resemble any page I've been to (at least not this week Being the masochist that I am, I decided to try and reproduce my error, restoring XF86Config from a backup copy that I made before beginning the mod, and misspelling IMPS/2 again and voila, I can reproduce the error (down to the same HTML code) but I cannot figure out why in the world it's happening.

Have I stumbled on some weird bug?? I would think not, as I cannot possibly be the first person to make this particular mistake.

Anybody got any ideas??

Thanks
Smee

Post the file. Just edit some of it out.

for what it's worth, i tried to reproduce the error using the exact steps you provided, including using jed, w/out success. i agree w/BajaNick, post the file, of course editing any foul content.