David Thomas wrote:

> Unfortunately, others on the project (with more clout)
> are unwilling to move these systems back to XFree86.
> While there *is* a 100% correlation between
> X.Org/XFree86 and crashing/not, it's doubtful that
> this is the only thing that's different between the
> systems.

What version of X.org? I had a lot of trouble on the Edgy Eft
release of Ubuntu which had X.org 7.0. Those troubles disappeared
when I moved to Ubuntu Feisty which has X.org 7.2.

> I guess I've a few questions.  
> 
> 1) I'm sure that there *shouldn't* be any sequence of
> calls to lablgl that should outright crash the X
> server... does anyone know how true this proves in
> practice?

No, the xserver should not crash because of a user space
program.

> 2) Any thoughts as to how I can pinpoint the problem a
> bit better?

Try strace/ltracing the executable to pinpoint which call
to the underlying X libs are causing the crash, then write
(in C if possible) a minimal test program to recreate the
problem and send it as a bug report to the X maintainers.

If you're not up to writing the minimal C program but can
write a minimal Ocaml program I'd be happy to translate it
for you.

Hope this helps,
Erik
-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  Erik de Castro Lopo
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
"Projects promoting programming in natural language are intrinsically
doomed to fail." -- Edsger Dijkstra