Oh well, How do you eat a whale ---> one bite at a time. Let's start eating...
David, as you tend to update your system routinely, because that is somewhat the nature of a rolling release, what system packages did you update at about the time you started to notice the problems? Perhaps that short list might provide a clue as what is also installed here.
At the moment I want to ignore nvidia and xorg server because I am using the same versions for 13.37 as well.
Oh, and I tried the same kwrite test with the vesa driver. My screen looked like silly putty but kwrite froze again. So probably not nvidia or xorg.
Darrell