X display shift with disabled console blanking

[James Pearson <james-p@moving-picture.com>]

I have a problem whereby the X display 'shifts' to left when anything 
writes to /dev/console - where console screen blanking has been disabled 
i.e. doing something like:

boot to run level 3

If not root, then make sure /dev/console is writeable

login and type:

setterm -blank 0

start X

type into an xterm:

echo "some random text" > /dev/console
(may have to repeat the echo above a few times)

... and the whole X display jumps (and wraps) to the left

I'm using a RHEL4 based distro with a vanilla 2.6.21 x86_64 kernel 
(although I've seen the problem with various x86_64 and i686 2.6.X kernels).

I've seen this problem on a number of different nVidia cards - using 
the vesa driver (same problem occurs with nVidia's binary driver). I 
haven't tried using other makes of graphics cards.


OK, this may be a strange combination of disabling the text console 
blanking and running X, but something isn't right somewhere ...

Any ideas?

Thanks

James Pearson