What to blame for ATI lockups after upgrade ?

[Frédéric L. W. Meunier]

I used XOrg 1.4 with ATI driver 6.7.196 without any problems 
for a month. I upgraded to XOrg 1.4.0.90 on december 13 and to 
ATI 6.7.197 on the 21.

On the 22, suddenly, while moving the mouse cursor, nothing 
worked anymore. I could move the mouse, but it was like an "I" 
and didn't do anything. The screen was apparently locked, as 
the clock didn't get updated.

After some time and no results, I decided to do a forced 
reboot. Then, I had the idea to use joyd, a mouse daemon that 
send commands.

Today, I had the same problem while moving the mouse.

One of the joyd commands was "/bin/killall -9 X", but the mouse 
also locked up when it was issued.

The other, "/sbin/reboot", worked, and apparently did a clean 
shutdown, because after a reboot there were no fsck messages 
about "recovery required".

In all above versions, I used the same DRI from Mesa 7.0.2. I 
have a Radeon 9600.

Xorg.0.log prints lots of these when it occurs:

tossed event which came in late
mieqEnequeue: out-of-order valuator event; dropping.