Let me start with a very quick background: I am a certified Linuxophile, have used quite a few distributions on and off over the years, and my usage has been split about half-way beteen SUSE 10 and Win XP over past few months.

I was looking for a good pre-installed audio recording program when I saw "KVdr". I tried it, received a black screen, and BAM! Completely unresponsive system, even to Ctrl+Alt+Backspace and Ctrl+Alt+Del. I tried this a couple more times, hoping to somehow be able to diagnose the problem, but same thing. Finally, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace worked, and I decided for the fun of it, to try fvwm2 (I use KDE by default but have all included WMs installed, as I have been interested in GUIs from the start). Fvwm2 first froze upon startup, but restarting the system brought it to work. Good and great - but FVWM2 doesn't really have much long-term appeal for me, so I decided to switch back to KDE by doing the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. Same unresponsive black screen! Then I tried another hopeful solution...switch the runlevel to 3, and try to start up KDE from the control panel...I tried "kdm", and I was returned to the unresponsive black screen.

Since Kvdr happens to be a video recording program, I should mention I am using the included X.org with ATI's propietary Radeon / OpenGL drivers.

This is a very annoying problem. I would like to believe Linux is ready for the desktop, but with problems like this it may be not.

It is clear this is an application problem, not a "Linux problem." The simplest solution is to report the bug to the people who wrote KVdr (currently at beta 0.64) and find another application to use in the meantime.

It wouldn't be much of a problem if it was just Kvdr.

The issue is that I am stuck in fvwm2 - trying to access kdm to switch to KDE (without FVWM2 running at the same time) freezes the system and leaves me with a black screen.

The last time I played with fvwm in SUSE, I changed back at the login screen by clicking the Session Type and choosing KDE instead of fvwm.