Hi,

>    why does loading fonts in the Xserver freeze the machine albeit for a short
>    while? Does the '60 get into a FPU instruction emulation trap?
> 
> Possible, or even into 64bit division. I didn't observe this on the
> DraCo, however.

I am not sure this is the problem. Does this only happen with the '060?
I had this happen several times when the font path the Xserver had to
search and process contained a lot of scaleable fonts. Try removing
these directories from your font path and see if this changes anything.

  Guenther