Well, after a few interations of "make install" and "tar zxf " I have 
Xfree86 4.1.0 working just fine in a nice happy bit depth of 24 with 
iceWM. If I change .xinitrc to call up startkde, it hangs at the 
"loading window manager" step. and I mean hangs: once more, I remove 
power (I stopped reseating the battery each time to save a step).

I have no compelling reason to use 4.1 -- I only use it because it works 
-- but unless someone has more information on 3.3.6  than "it works for 
me," I'm stuck. If I didn't actually need to use this machine now, after 
having lost much of the past week wrestling with KDE and now X, I'd 
strip it down and start over, but as I recall, XFree 3.3.6 *never* ran 
for me. Always the hard freeze or the mysterious "running on a virtual 
console you can't get to" stuff.

I don't mean to sound totally hacked off, but this is pretty frustrating 
stuff: I feel like a Windows user ("format and re-install") with this.