Characters Disappearing on virtual consoles

[Miller Paul <pmiller@jove.acs.unt.edu>]

This problem is not like a messed up terminal after 'catting' a binary
file. What I see is the bitmaps of characters not being fully
displayedin my virtual consoles. At first everything is OK, but I leave
the terminal unattended for say about 20 minutes, I see the bad
bitmapped characters. This does occur for each occurance of that
particular character (ASCII code).

If I am running X, I can switch to X then back to the virtual console
and most of the time the problem is fixed. But no more than 20 minutes
later...the problem recurs.

I do not see this happening in X at all. This leads me to believe that
VRAM is OK. I have also tested the VRAM with Amidiags with no errors
(for what its worth). The other reason I do not suspect VRAM is it
happens to each occurance of a character meaning the problem is not
neccessarily random.

Here's what I got:
Pentium-MMX 200
Matrox Mystique 2M VRAM
40M RAM
Samsung 3.1G IDE HD
SoundBlaster 64 Gold (not near video card)
Debian 2.0

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Paul Miller
pmiller@jove.acs.unt.edu