From Terry Eck to Guy Van Sanden and SuSE about Re: [SLE] Latest nvidia drivers:
Whenever I switch to VC1 and it is messed up I run /usr/bin/textmode. This seems to solve the console problem for me. One problem I have not been able to solve yet (don't know it it nVidia or kdm) is X locking and loosing the mouse and keyboard. This has happened three time in the last couple of months since I installed the nVidia card and driver. In this case I had to hit the reset button. I had this too, the only thing I could do was logging in from my router and rebooting my computer. It doesn't happen with me since i switch off agp (option "NvAGP" "0"). The cool thing is, if I need agp (for QuakeIII), I use startq (guess what the q is for (c: ) which is a script I wrote. It's similar to startx but uses another display number, looks for the windowmanager in .qinitrc and uses another XF86Config file, in which I left AGP switched on. If I start X with startx, agp is off (cat /proc/nv/card0). If I then switch back to textmode and startq, agp is on (for both X'es of course), if I then leave the window manager I use for startq, it's off again. Very cool. :)
hth,
Anyway, hope the savetextmode and textmode commands solve part of your problem.
Terry
-- dieter