HELP: Trident issues with cyberblade32xp4 on Toshiba laptop

[Philip Prindeville]

I have a Toshiba Tecra M1 running FC7 updated and 
xorg-x11-drv-trident-1.2.3-4 which is reasonably current.

However, whenever I fire up X, there are issues.  I either get a black 
screen (this is on the laptop LCD) with green or red stripes along the 
right side, or else I get something that looks like time-lapse 
photography of a crystal forming under polarized light.

And if I try to use the Vesa driver, it coredumps:

Backtrace:
0: /usr/bin/Xorg(xf86SigHandler+0x81) [0x80c2d21]
1: [0x110420]
2: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libfb.so(fbCompositeSrc_8888x8888mmx+0x169) 
[0x466479]
3: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libfb.so(fbComposite+0x57f) [0x45899f]
4: /usr/bin/Xorg [0x8178ff6]
5: /usr/bin/Xorg [0x81758f6]
6: /usr/bin/Xorg(CompositePicture+0x153) [0x815bf23]
7: /usr/bin/Xorg [0x81206b6]
8: /usr/bin/Xorg [0x8131b82]
9: /usr/bin/Xorg(miPointerUpdate+0x164) [0x812a0a4]
10: /usr/bin/Xorg [0x812a1b9]
11: /usr/bin/Xorg [0x81427be]
12: /usr/bin/Xorg [0x81666b1]
13: /usr/bin/Xorg [0x80917c7]
14: /usr/bin/Xorg(ChangeWindowAttributes+0xc68) [0x8078bb8]
15: /usr/bin/Xorg(ProcChangeWindowAttributes+0xa0) [0x80896b0]
16: /usr/bin/Xorg [0x81523c1]
17: /usr/bin/Xorg(Dispatch+0x1aa) [0x80899fa]
18: /usr/bin/Xorg(main+0x495) [0x8071735]
19: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe0) [0x1eff70]
20: /usr/bin/Xorg(FontFileCompleteXLFD+0x1e9) [0x8070a21]

Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11.  Server aborting

I googled this issue and found a lot of other people had seen it, going 
back 4+ years.  But I only found two postings where people claimed to 
have fixed it... and their configs didn't work for me.

So, to the trident maintainers...  did this issue ever get resolved?  
Does anyone have any recollection of what the fix was, or could they 
invest a few minutes helping me troubleshoot this?

Thanks,

-Philip