Debian Lenny gets new X packages; but no help for my problem

I've talked for some time about the ghosting I get on the upper panel and in portions of Iceweasel/Firefox when using GNOME and Xfce in Debian Lenny.

All I have to do to make the problem go away is boot with the Xfce or Fluxbox window managers. It also doesn't happen with Debian Etch, an install of which I did yesterday. OK, I've seen the problem in Xfce, too ... and it seems related to X refresh.

So it's very possible that the problem I'm having isn't X- or driver-related, but something deep in the heart of GNOME.

I don't know if I'm the only one experiencing this problem, but I haven't been able to find any other reference to the problem, most likely because I'm not describing it in anywhere near the same way as anybody else.

A bunch of Xorg packages flowed into Lenny today, and I installed them. I'm still seeing some funky graphics in my "forward" arrow in Iceweasel, and sometime the little Web icon next to the Web page's name goes all green and opaque on me.

The problem with Iceweasel goes away if I drag the window so a portion goes off the screen. When it refreshes, all is well. The same happens when I mouse over icons in the upper GNOME panel. Of course it's hard to drag the upper GNOME panel off the screen, so areas with no icons or menus tend to stay funky.

So the problem has something to do with screen refresh. Perhaps an xorg.conf tweak will help me? Could the problem be somehow related to Iceweasel? (I've started running Epiphany to see how that affects the system.) I have no idea.

All I know is that I don't have the problem in Ubuntu, in Debian Etch, or in any other distro on this very same hardware.

And while I'm on the subject, compare /etc/X11/xorg.conf in Ubuntu Hardy with the same file on a Debian install. They look very, very different. Ubuntu's is much shorter. Autoconfiguration — or different apps/files — must be taking care of a whole lot more, given the short xorg.conf in Ubuntu.

I'm about to do a second install of Lenny on a free partition to see if a fresh installation takes care of the problem. I'm willing to break off /home into its own partition and reinstall Lenny since it works so much better on this laptop than Etch ever did. Aside from this nagging problem, of course.

This video issue and figuring out suspend/resume are pretty much the only things keeping Lenny from being as good as or better than Ubuntu Hardy on this machine. I'd like to say that I got Lenny to work better, but so far that hasn't happened.

I've tried LOTS of distributions, everything from Mandriva to PCLinuxOS to CentOS 5.2 and Fedora 9, and nothing except Ubuntu has working suspend/resume out of the box on this Gateway Solo 1450 (which comes up as "unknown" with s2ram at a console).

Just as I figured out how to control the CPU fan under ACPI, I'd love to have that same mastery over suspend/resume. If only ...

I realize that the whole Debian project ain't about me and my petty problems with my obscure hardware, but I'd like to see things working better. Maybe I'll do that reinstall and see how a fresh Lenny looks.