Well, my problems with KDE2 have been cleared up. As noted, building against
the XFree 4.1 snapshot seems to be ill-advised. When I built 3.3.6 out of
xsrc, KDE2 built just fine. And it looked OK yesterday until I rebooted.
Then I discovered I had only 8 bit color and horrid colormap issses
(specifically in Mozilla).

If I try to configure X with xf86config, I get a config that will hang my
machine so hard that removing power is my only option with attendant fsck of
my filesystems. 

I can't get XF86Setup to work: it keeps complaining about going to a virtual
console but Alt-F[1234] don't get me anything. Sometimes this is
unrecoverable as well.

Does anyone have any idea how to create a basic X config file that will work
and allow me to modify it as needed? I'd take 8 bit color right now.

Or is there a way to make XF86Setup work? What am I missing, given that I
have had X working on virtual console as recently as this morning?

I should also mention this is a laptop, so a hardcoded 1024 * 768 display at
24 bpp is fine. Using the ATI Rage Mobility card w/ 8 Mb video RAM.

Alternatively, using 4.1 again is fine: I just need to be sure it won't hose
up any subsequent installations.