broken vt output

[Michael Erskine <msemtd@yahoo.co.uk>]

Hi all,

I have a bizarre problem with one of my Sarge boxes: when I boot to the 
default runlevel (2 - with KDE) the virtual terminals on the console (vt1 to 
vt6 - regular console - not fb) seem to be displaying the wrong data! I can 
work on the vts but I can't see what I'm typing -- I get "old" data as 
output: to begin with it's messages produced during the boot process and 
eventually seemingly random data, very colourful and occasionally blinking! 
This set of output data eventually repeats itself regardless of whatever is 
typed as input and whatever output is "expected". Lots of fun! The vts are 
rendered rather useless but I tend to use X nowadays (not good when the 
nvidia-glx breaks every kernel upgrade though!) so I can always "chvt 7". 
Booting to single user (grub provides "recovery mode") gives me the single vt 
that works as expected.

Has anyone seen this before?

Regards,
Michael.