Comment 29 for bug 304514

Bugzilla 21415 may well be the same problem. Some comments there said that turning swap off helped. This Thinkpad R31 has 512 mb and is not very happy with swap off, however it does run. The font smear or corruption (extra bits) is slower in appearing. I'll attach Xorg.0.log with swap off and font corruptions accumulating. . On this Thinkpad the trouble appeared about the time the driver was updated so Option "NoAccel" was not necessary.

The driver in use is 2.7.0.

Jerry