At last, a problem I don't have! It may not be related, but I run startx from
root all the time in XFree86 4.1.0. I can do the default wm, which is twm I 
think. But I usually do kde2. Neither does as described, not in root or any 
other account.

Mine is a GeForce2 made by Visiontek, with 30MB. I'm too much a newbie myself
to give real advice. But perhaps this info saves time in other ways? One 
hopes.

On Friday 28 September 2001 18:51, you wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, Marc Sernatinger wrote:
> > Try as I might, I have been unable to determine the source of my
> > problems, as simple as they may be. I am, indeed, a netbsd newbod, so
> > most any of my problems will be pretty simple ones, I hope. Basically my
> > problem is that I experience various glitches and artifacts when I start
> > my X server. I use the default window manager TWM, and among other
> > problems, if I try to click on the root window to bring up the menu, the
> > options on the menu do not become visible until I pass the mouse over the
> > point where the options SHOULD be. Other than that, running xvidtune
> > causes artifacts to pop up all over the screen (making the program
> > unusable, as I can see nothing of it).
>
> I don't remember the solution to this (I had it, someone did suggest it),
> but this sounds exactly like what I experienced when I tried to run
> X server as root user. Could this be the problem?
>
> For me, X did exactly the above as root, but worked normally as some
> other normal user. There might be something on the netbsd-help archives
> around March or April, perhaps.