After a couple of hours spent with a getty in the background, I
experienced weird key repeat problems and sometimes the console in the
background would take control of the keyboard.

This seems to be common to other architectures too, and was discussed
a while ago on the lists:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2000/04/03/0006.html

So I would still recommend deactivating ttyE0 in /etc/ttys, and not
using startx.

Regards,
 Aymeric

Aymeric Vincent <Aymeric.Vincent@labri.fr> writes:

> startx works, ^R at the xdm prompt goes back to the console.
> 
> Regards,
>  Aymeric
> 
> Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@netbsd.org>
> 
> > So this change isn't useful for those of us who log in and then run
> > startx?
> 
> Andrew Cagney <cagney@mac.com> writes:
> 
> > Or cntrl-r at the xdm prompt?