I did a fresh install of slackware 12.1, full install, on the free partition.
First it seemed everything was OK.
XFCE is my favorite DE. I opened XFCE's terminal at see what I got:
http://www.2and2.net/files/48233d87e0960.png
Distorted and un-usable Terminal .

It was even worse in KDE. My computer froze when I tried to open Terminal. Only cold reboot helped.

My next thought was it was bad installation disk. I checked
md5sum of disk2 where XFCE resides and separately md5sum of
XFCE package but the sums were fine.

Then I uninstalled and reinstalled XFCE. Nothing changed.

Next I downloaded Terminals source and installed it with
the help of src2pkg. Nope. It did not help.

Apparently is problem sowhere else.

Has anyone experienced something similar ? Where to look at ?
Of course I can use other terminals, like konsole or xterm,
but I would like to get a perfect Slacware experience !

Change to another X.Org driver. The default is for Slackware to use the VESA driver and running Terminal crashes your computer on some types on hardware with the VESA driver.

Let "xorgsetup" decide which driver is appropriate for your graphics card, and with the new driver try Terminal again.

Eric

Thank you Eric,
it was exactly VESA drivers fault !

I did "xorgsetup" and got my ATI card detected and
radeon driver in my new xorg.conf.

Seems everything is working (at least at first sight !).