Every fifth character blurred in text and window manager too large

[Xeno Campanoli <xeno@eskimo.com>]

I've got this install of Debian on my brand new emachine T3985 Desktop 
PC that never has been very good, and I'm finally forced now to work 
with it because my SuSE system had a disk failure.  I've got the 
following problem with this Debian install:

1)  still no sound, but this is the lowest priority, and I've worked on 
it far too much already, so please help me fix the other stuff first.
2)  the window manager or X configuration is configured so the fonts and 
all my windows are still a little too big. 
3)  Every fifth or sixth text character is blurred and just generally 
text is grainy, so I think I have a video configuration problem
4)  Some pulldown windows (thunderbird, for instance) have the pulldown 
window options go white when I have the mouse against them so I can't 
read the text of the option except when the mouse is NOT selecting it.

Thank you for any help.

Sincerely, Xeno