I'm running Ubuntu 8.04, and I have Gnome and XFCE installed. I use Gnome as my default desktop, but I installed XFCE for games, because my laptop isn't the best, I wanted something a little more lightweight than Gnome. I installed XFCE today because I have wine installed, and I wanted to play morrowind, it works fine in gnome, other being slow, due to my laptop's deficient hardware. It worked fine in windows, when I still had the tolerance for windows. But XFCE doesn't like it for some reason or another, as soon as I go full screen, I get an error, but I can't read the error because everything bugs up so bad, nothing is inside the error prompt. I thought of running it in a terminal, but I think the same would happen and I wouldn't be able to read the terminal anyways. Any help is greatly appreciated.

NOTE: Photoshot Elements works fine in wine, even in XFCE.

Just spitballin here but maybe graphical effects are enabled in xfce? Generally games and effects do not play nice together.

Also if you want to be able to read the error messages you can redirect the output to a file... eg. for bash to redirect stdout and stderr:

command_to_start_morrowind > filename 2>&1

I dunno what it would be for tcsh - something similar I suppose but a quick reference to the manual should be enlightening.

Alternatively you could start the command from a tty console (non-x terminal - the stuff you get to by CTRL+ALT+F1, etc) if you set your $DISPLAY and $XAUTHORITY environment variables correctly. This way when the X screen gets corrupted you can see the messages on the terminal. Again for bash:

export DISPLAY=:0 (:0 is a guess, but is probably right unless you run multiple X servers)
export XAUTHORITY=$HOME/.Xauthority
command_to_start_morrowind

I have no idea what you just said, I can pick out a few words, but that's it, you lost me at the end of your third sentence.