getting to runlevel 3 after X crash?

["Richard E. Hawkins Esq." <hawk@eyry.econ.iastate.edu>]

information junky that I am, i set rvplayer running again on friday, 
and it crashed X another couple of times.  The bad way, so that it 
can't be restarted ("failure in apmsync()" and the blinkies).

This time, I remembered that some had suggested that going to runlevel 
3 rather than rebooting might solve things (somehow, when X goes down, 
it corrupts something badly enough that it has the sync problem when it 
tries to restart).

I tried logging in remotely and using "telint 3" as root, but when I 
came back to my office, it was still in a fit of the blinkies; xdm had 
not been killed.

Do I need to do something more? (killall -9 xdm first??)

And is there a way to force my video card to fully reset itself?  My 
uninformed & ignorant suspicion is that it's something on the card 
itself that gets reset during boot, but not upon instantiating X . . .
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