I had a problem similar to this and I thought it was a glitch with xscreensaver, however, I found out that my problem was in the powersave settings. I had turned off all the power saving options, ie-monitor, turn off hard disks, etc., so that my machine would continue to run and my screensaver would run indefinitely. In past releases of SuSE that is what you would do, just disable those power save settings. I don't know if this is a glitch with SuSE 10.0 or if it is intentional but I found I had to go back and turn all those settings back on and then set the timers to zero. In other words my monitor would shut off after 0 minutes of inactivity, my hard disks would shut off after 0 minutes of activity, etc. and this fixed my problem. My screensaver worked then and I was able to lock my screen and my monitor and hard disks would still run continously. I hope this helps. Cheers.

I've ran into this problem running Suse 10 on a Dell Latitude 810. I usually run it with ACPI disabled in the kernel due to the horrific VMWare performance bug with ACPI. Since the initial install the problem has been persistant - the screensaver only occasionally will kick on, and the system never locks. I've tried the settings mentioned by TuxSurfer, with no luck. I'm not even sure how to troubleshoot this, which is fairly frustrating

Anyone have any advice?

I should also mention that before I made the adjustments to the power control settings I ran xscreensaver from a shell both as user and as root. That almost cured the problem then adjusted the power control settings as user and as root also and that solved my problem. I don't know if one has to do with the other or if it was coincidence but I thought I would pass that on. Best of luck on this, there is not much else on this topic in the forums. If this fixes the problem for anyone else besides me please be sure and post. Regards