Comment 54 for bug 278318

While the patch provided (http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/Testing/intel/) does prevent the tearing problem, it also causes a new problem.

About 10% of the time that I open a movie in mplayer, the screen will entirely switch to one (random) color and flash between that color and black on an irregular basis.

Oddly, the programs running are still responsive (i.e. 'q' still quits, and 'space' still pauses mplayer), but there is no way to use the computer at this point. Switching to a virtual console (ctrl-alt-F1) simply causes the screen to black out. Ctrl-alt-backspace has no effect.

The only way to recover is to reboot the system.