Ive had this problem for some time but havent really done anything until now. I have no idea what is wrong, but for some reason when i select any GL screensavers in kde, they will not start automatically. non 3d screensavers work perfectly normal, however. when im scrolling through the selection of screensavers, i get previews of all the screen savers including GL ones, and if i hit the test button of a GL screensaver, it will launch the screensaver just fine, works great (so i know that the screensavers work and my acceleration works). but if i select the GL screensaver and wait for it to automatically start, it doesnt. what happens instead is that kde will, after the 3 minutes, instead of starting the 3d screensaver, will lock the screen and sit there, so it looks like it is just the desktop, but if i move the mouse the screen will kind of glitch. i know it locks the screen because the clock in the kicker stays on the time that the screensaver was supposed to start and when i move the mouse the clock jumps to the correct time. so instead of having the screensaver, it just displays whatever the screen was when the screensaver was supposed to start. I hope this makes sense. (its like all GL screensavers are just a picture of my desktop at the time the screensaver should start)

I have my 3d drivers installed fine, and i know 3d acceleration is working properly. This problem continues to happen to me on gentoo and slackware. i was running a stage 1 compile of gentoo, but now i formated and installed slackware 10, and the problem occurred on both distros. the problem also occurres with both nvidia drivers 5336 and the new 6106, xfree86 4.3, xfree86 4.4, and x.org.

This problem is really annoying. i cant use any of the good 3d screensavers. i am stuck with using 2d boring ones. if anyone has any information to help me out, i would really appreciate it.

thanks again.

can you start "any" of the (gl) screensavers via a term window ??
I have "really slick screensavers intalled, these require(GL) to be working, so I would do this to test..........

cd /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver
./biof

a window should pop up, not full screen. you should see the saver in action.

The screensaver you told me to run doesnt exist on my computer, but I ran about three of the GL screensavers from this folder (that i want to run normally) in the term, and all of them start normally like you said. Hope this helps.

now, after looking through the xscreensaver folder, i realized that all of those screensavers are the ones that do work, even the opengl ones. however, non xscreensaver savers such as kde native ones, which are not located in the xscreensaver folder, do not start automatically. i can still see them in the screensaver configurator, but i can only start the screensavers located in the /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver folder. i tried going to /opt/kde/bin and coping over some kde screensavers into the xscreensaver folder, but that didnt do anything (though i can open them in the term). those ones still do not start automatically.
But now i realize now that it isnt an opengl issue, because some of the opengl xscreensavers do start. but because most of the opengl savers are not xscreens, i assumed it to be just the opengl.