I mentioned a couple of crashes before, and now i've partway isolated 
what happnes.  And it may qualify as a "bad thing" :)

Somehow, while running in 1 bit, with the xserver active and happily 
doing its thing, the mac got reset to 8 bit color.

I know that this sounds strange, but it happened twice.  The first time, 
I didn't catch it.  THere was a massive blowup, and I ended up untarring 
the xbase again.   It didn't occur to me until the second time that my 
system never should have been in color that day.

The second time, x suddenly bombed out.  startx failed, putting a 
message i couldn't quite catch on the screen.  I rebooted the system, 
rebooted bsd, and tried again.  Then it occurred to me:  there had been 
color icons on the desktop.  I rebooted under macos, and, sure enough, 
it was in 8 bit.  I reset to 1 bit and all was well.

Both times that it did this the active application, and most likely 
suspect, was lyx running on a 486.

rick