As a followup to my original message:

>     One thing I have noticed is that every time (about 12 now) I've
> tried running X and it's crashed, the HDD has always been in mid-access.
>  From when it crashes until the NCR BIOS resets the SCSI bus, the access
> light for the computer glows steady.  Could it be a problem with the NCR
> driver that's causing XFree86 to crash??

    On the advice of dozens of people, I've tried everything from
different mouse protocols and monitor options in the XF86Config,
switching my PS/2 mouse to a serial port, moving my net card from ed0 to
ed2, changing the IRQ's of just about every aspect of my system, putzing
with BIOS settings, and just about every combination of the above.  In
over 100 tries, the machine has still locked every time, either during
the startup of the initial xclients, or if it makes it past that point,
mouse movements while the SCSI HD's accessing.

    Every time, that is, except for one try.  My only successful run of
XFree86 occurred when I installed NetBSD on my 270MB Quantum IDE HD.  I
hosed all the DOS and OS/2 files I had on it to give XFree a shot with
IDE.  I compiled a kernel and XF86Config that was identical to the one
I've been using, except that the NCR SCSI driver was commented out. 
When I launched X, it came up quickly and smoothly.  I proceeded to beat
the tar out of it, launching dozens of copies of applications such as
emacs, netscape, xmh, xterms, etc, moving the mouse (quite violently at
times) during every one, and often changing resolutions.  The screen did
not glitch, and it did not crash.

    Unfortunately, I have no other conclusions to draw than that the NCR
SCSI system must be the entire cause of my problem.  Which makes me
wonder, I've noticed that the NCR drivers have been updated since
NetBSD-1.1.  Does anybody know the nature of the changes, and if the
kind of problem I'm having may have been fixed???  My system came with a
disk that had drivers (presumably from NCR) for SCO Unix, I assume
somebody's seen this and it's of no help to the *BSD/Linux community? 
I'd think if it's a driver from NCR, it'd be expected to work, or maybe
they'd even offer to help create a more stable driver.  I assume this
issue has been looked into before???

    Thanks again.  I appreciate all the help I've gotten from the
readers of this list.  You're a great bunch of people, I guess I just
bought the wrong system.

                                                          Will Ferry

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William O Ferry <woferry@WarpDrive.COM> | finger:  woferry@WarpDrive.COM
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