Font display glitches

[Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost>]

Hello,

it has been weeks/months that I am experience strange font display 
glitches, the continue to exist even if I ent through a couple updates, 
I'm running pretty current stuff.

What happens is that instead of words, I see "garbage" in about the size 
of the text.. that is random portion of the text on the display (it may 
be anywhere, menus... or a couple of words inside a whole webpage). It 
looks something is corrupted, interestingly it is displayed in the same 
color as the text would. It is not some specific text: often just 
scrolling the webpage displayed makes the words reappear or moving the 
window.. Sometimes even waiting for some refresh even fixes them
It can happens cross many applications, it is not something specific to 
a certain application.

This elusive bug has certain properties:
1) it does not happen with every application: Xterm and Windowmaker just 
display always perfectly. Firefox, Thunderbird and all GNUstep 
applications (cairo backend) are affected. Thus it must be some 
incomatibility with cairo or related library
2) It does not happen when I export the display to another computer! I 
work for hours with an exported display and it is just perfect and stable
3) it appears to "get worse" after a time with app usage. A fresh X11 
start with a fresh app looks fine, after a bit of system usage, it 
starts to appear

Thus I guess it is not just "library X is broken" but it is in 
conjunction with the local Xorg server.

Riccardo

PS: this is my videocard
agp0 at pchb0: detected 7932k stolen memory
agp0: aperture at 0xc0000000, size 0x10000000
vga1 at pci0 dev 2 function 0: vendor 0x8086 product 0x2592 (rev. 0x03)
wsdisplay0 at vga1 kbdmux 1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation), using wskbd0
wsmux1: connecting to wsdisplay0
i915drm0 at vga1: Intel i915GM
i915drm0: AGP at 0xc0000000 256MB
i915drm0: Initialized i915 1.6.0 20080730
vendor 0x8086 product 0x2792 (miscellaneous display, revision 0x03) at 
pci0 dev 2 function 1 not configured