desktop effects immediately broke everything, hard to recover from

[Jay]

Compaq R4000 laptop, 1.5gig, / is 19% in use.
Hardy Heron 10.4 beta KDE4 AMD64

Enable desktop effects.
That crashed everything somehow and brought back to login screen.
And then the screen started going funny, cycling through colors,
corrupt display.

Power cycled.

Login would fail, after the icon progress was almost done.

Logged into failsafe session.
After quite some poking around, nothing much in forums or man
pages, finally found ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrc and
disabled compositing there.
Ok now.

Wow, this sucks.

lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge
00:04.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB2 Host Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 SMBus Controller (rev 10)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 IDE Controller
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-ISA Bridge
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-PCI Bridge
00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:14.6 Modem: ATI Technologies Inc SB400 AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)
03:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)
03:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1510 PC card Cardbus Controller
03:06.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)

jay@jayx2:~$ lspci -n
00:00.0 0600: 1002:5950
00:01.0 0604: 1002:5a3f
00:04.0 0604: 1002:5a36
00:13.0 0c03: 1002:4374
00:13.1 0c03: 1002:4375
00:13.2 0c03: 1002:4373
00:14.0 0c05: 1002:4372 (rev 10)
00:14.1 0101: 1002:4376
00:14.3 0601: 1002:4377
00:14.4 0604: 1002:4371
00:14.5 0401: 1002:4370 (rev 01)
00:14.6 0703: 1002:4378 (rev 01)
00:18.0 0600: 1022:1100
00:18.1 0600: 1022:1101
00:18.2 0600: 1022:1102
00:18.3 0600: 1022:1103
01:05.0 0300: 1002:5955
03:02.0 0280: 14e4:4320 (rev 03)
03:04.0 0607: 104c:ac56
03:06.0 0200: 10ec:8139 (rev 10)

.xsession-errors attached.
(I had to cp it to xsession-errors as the all files button in the attach dialog doesn't work)

 - Jay