theyre pmag-b, or pmagb-b (yes, it was not such a wise choice to make so 
many names so similar)? 
has there been any kind of crazy event like a bad power surge or outage
recently? 


> Yes, both machine give the exact same message.

very strange. 

> I have the feeling that something is not quite kosher with these
> pmag-b cards. In some windows, mainly black letters over gray
> background (e.g. mozilla) part of the letters don't show up clearly,
> as if they were partially erased, something that didn't occur
> before.

I've had mozilla do things like this to me on several different machines 
though, i think mozilla's font rendering sucks and could be the culprit. 
was mozilla changed recently? 

by the way, are you running the mozilla _on_ the decstation? under 
netbsd? how does it perform? did you compile it, or use a prebuilt 
binary? any gotchas about compiling it, if you built it?

> >machines have been cleaned, it's worth it to put 20 min to cleaning
> >them out well. if you have a vacuum with a soft brush-attachment, that is
> 
> I did clean the connectors, but no avail.

the turbochannel slots and the memory connects, right? the 3W3 video 
connector is pretty corrosion-and-crud resistant. 

In any case, if the video card has failed, i could probably (depending on 
what kind it is) send you one for the price of postage, i have a bunch of 
extras and i only have graphical heads on two decstations, all the rest 
of my computers run with serial consoles.

> Thanks for your help.
> 
> Dan

happy hacking!
isildur