text console display question

[james T]

Can anyone shed some light on this problem?
When I boot up, I boot into a text console, and everything is fine. I 
can switch to other text consoles via alt-f2 etc. The problem occurs 
when I start xwindows. Once X is loaded, if I try to switch to a text 
console via alt-f2 (etc) I get a text console that is horizontally 
scrambled and unreadable. I can interact with it assuming I type 
without mistake, I just can't see what I'm doing. Also when i shutdown 
the computer from within x windows, during the shutdown process when it 
switches to text, the text there is also scrambled and unreadable.

This problem seemed to crop up when I finally got acceleration under X 
windows happening, before that I was able to switch back and forth 
fine. FWIW I'm running 2.4.24 kernel, xFree 4.3.0, xfree-drm 4.3.0 on a 
G4 450 (sawtooth) with a radeon 8500 (64mb).

thanks in advance,
James