Font and color corruption when su-ing to root in xterm.

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

I've been having a peculiar error once in a while both in xfree 4.3
and now in xorg-x11 6.8.0, when i start up X, open an xterm and su
to root the colors of applications will sometime mess up and fonts
will become practically unreadable – although this is visible in the X
session a screenshot of the error shows nothing abnormal, but colors
like bright-blue turn pink, fonts become unclear with fuzzy borders.

I am unable to reproduce this fully, sometimes it happens every time i
log in as root, in X through an xterm even across X restarts and other
days it doesn't happen at all.

Since i had no idea what this could be or even how to begin to debug
this i'm sending this to the general discussion list in the hope that
someone more knowledgeable than me about the internals of X will have
a clue as to what the problem could be.