said Mag. Dr. Nikolaus Klepp: | Dies the odd things happen when you use FVWM or just on TDE?
i don't use anything else. fwiw, they don't happen when i boot over to windows (which is on the machine solely because it was a preinstall, and with gparted i was able to shrink it down; then if i ever get rid of this machine i can nuke the linux partitions and resize the windows partition back; also, this one time to boot it to see if it breaks the keyboard, which it doesn't).