Old rage based card has poor damage control recovery.

[Vladimir Dergachev]

>>> bucks locally.  As in Yeeeouch!  The most active game it might
>>> play is sol.
>>>
>>> Oh, and its running gnome.
>>
>> Could you try to find out what causes this ?
>>
>> You can try to use "xset" to cause the Xserver blank manually.
>> Check which of the different ways to blank (plain blank, dpms
>> levels, etc.)
>
> The monitor is a quite new Samtron 17", does dpms and all that without
> any problems.  The blanker I'm using is the blank screen.

You misunderstood me - you can try to use xset to *cause* the screen to 
blank immediately, instead of waiting for the screensaver to kick in.

Since there are several different methods to blank the screen it is useful 
to know which xset command causes the problem.

Another suggestion - check that all modules were upgraded. Maybe it ran 
out of space or something.

And - switching to console mode (Ctrl-Alt-F1) does not depend on the 
kernel.

                           best

                               Vladimir Dergachev