Sorry folks. PEBKAC I think. Marco was listed as one of the startup programs...totally unnecessary I think. Mate is back to normal. I am running Mate as a main desktop on Debian Sid and noticed today xorg is hogging the cpu. Htop reports 12-15% cpu for xorg, and that is up quite a bit from the past. I don't recall the last time xorg or related packages were updated. Is there a way to figure out what's the problem ?