X/kernel compatibiity?

[Ross Boylan <ross@biostat.ucsf.edu>]

My amd64 system is basically running stable, including X, but I'm
running linux-image-2.6.32-5-amd64 and associated firmware for reasons
unrelated to X.

After a recent upgrade, my monitor started behaving poorly (shrunk
vertically and flickering), and I'm wondering if this could be from an X
vs kernel mismatch.

Does anybody know if that's possible and what I could do to fix or test
this?  It doesn't look as if pulling my video driver,
xserver-xorg-video-radeon is a good idea since it will pull in the whole
testing X.  I could rebuild the stable version from source.

Hardware
video: ATI Technologies Inc RV570 [Radeon X1950 Pro] rev 0, Mem @
    0xd0000000/28, 0xf0300000/16, I/O @ 0x2000/8
Xeon chips (multiple CPUs).


Thanks.
Ross