xscreensaver closes instantly

I've installed xscreensaver, but when previewing the screen savers, they show up for less than a second and then close. The screen savers also don't show up after leaving my computer for an extended amount of time. I turned the pointerHysteresis way up and tested that so I don't think it's the mouse.

Has anyone heard of this or have an idea of what might be going on? Also for the record I'm running an older Dell laptop. Inspiron 1501. Running FreeBSD 9.0 and Xfce4.

I'd also like to note that the configuration file in the home folder is replaced every time the daemon starts. Not sure what that's all about.
 
Open a terminal and run xscreensaver-demo on the command line. Any errors or weird messages showing up?
 
The only output in the terminal is a "libglade-WARNING" about not having support for gnome, but I'm not sure if that's relevant. Like I said though, when I hit preview the screen savers show up for less than a second and then go away almost as fast as they went up.
 
That's odd. The preview should only stop when you click the mouse. Moving it shouldn't stop the preview.

Do you have Gnome or XFCE installed? And which variant of xscreensaver did you install?
 
I have Xfce4. I've tried both the version of xscreensaver that comes with pkg_add (5.15 I believe) and compiled the version from ports. All the deps should be the latest from ports.

edit: there doesn't appear to be any random mouse clicking going on. I've hovered over various things to see if it had any effect.
 
I tried xscreensaver-gnome, but the same thing happened. I just tried turning off hal and waiting for the screen saver to come on and it actually worked. I'm however not exactly sure how I would troubleshoot for either the keyboard and mouse making phantom keystrokes/clicks or what have you. There's certainly been no indication of it other than this as far as I can tell.

For now though I guess I'm going to get some rest and worry about it tomorrow.
 
This sort of sounds familiar. I had an old Acer laptop that I suspect had really cheap hardware. If I booted with ACPI enabled it would do strange things in X and xScreensaver didn't work if I remember correctly. I have no technical knowledge of why that might be exactly, just going by (blurry) memory.

Have you tried disabling ACPI at boot time by chance?
 
When I tried disabling ACPI at boot time it said
Code:
Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
and rebooted.

Here's the xorg.conf
Code:
Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "X.org Configured"
	Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
	InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
	InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
	ModulePath   "/usr/local/lib/xorg/modules"
	FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
	FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
	FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/OTF"
	FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
	FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
	FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
	Load  "dbe"
	Load  "dri"
	Load  "dri2"
	Load  "extmod"
	Load  "glx"
	Load  "record"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Keyboard0"
	Driver      "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Mouse0"
	Driver      "mouse"
	Option	    "Protocol" "auto"
	Option	    "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
	Option	    "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	#DisplaySize	  330   210	# mm
	Identifier   "Monitor0"
	VendorName   "LPL"
	ModelName    "1001"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        ### Available Driver options are:-
        ### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
        ### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz"
        ### [arg]: arg optional
        #Option     "NoAccel"            	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "SWcursor"           	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "Dac6Bit"            	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "Dac8Bit"            	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "BusType"            	# [<str>]
        #Option     "CPPIOMode"          	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "CPusecTimeout"      	# <i>
        #Option     "AGPMode"            	# <i>
        #Option     "AGPFastWrite"       	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "AGPSize"            	# <i>
        #Option     "GARTSize"           	# <i>
        #Option     "RingSize"           	# <i>
        #Option     "BufferSize"         	# <i>
        #Option     "EnableDepthMoves"   	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "EnablePageFlip"     	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "NoBackBuffer"       	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "DMAForXv"           	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "FBTexPercent"       	# <i>
        #Option     "DepthBits"          	# <i>
        #Option     "PCIAPERSize"        	# <i>
        #Option     "AccelDFS"           	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "IgnoreEDID"         	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "CustomEDID"         	# [<str>]
        #Option     "DisplayPriority"    	# [<str>]
        #Option     "PanelSize"          	# [<str>]
        #Option     "ForceMinDotClock"   	# <freq>
        #Option     "ColorTiling"        	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "VideoKey"           	# <i>
        #Option     "RageTheatreCrystal" 	# <i>
        #Option     "RageTheatreTunerPort" 	# <i>
        #Option     "RageTheatreCompositePort" 	# <i>
        #Option     "RageTheatreSVideoPort" 	# <i>
        #Option     "TunerType"          	# <i>
        #Option     "RageTheatreMicrocPath" 	# <str>
        #Option     "RageTheatreMicrocType" 	# <str>
        #Option     "ScalerWidth"        	# <i>
        #Option     "RenderAccel"        	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "SubPixelOrder"      	# [<str>]
        #Option     "ClockGating"        	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "VGAAccess"          	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "ReverseDDC"         	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "LVDSProbePLL"       	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "AccelMethod"        	# <str>
        #Option     "DRI"                	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "ConnectorTable"     	# <str>
        #Option     "DefaultConnectorTable" 	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "DefaultTMDSPLL"     	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "TVDACLoadDetect"    	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "ForceTVOut"         	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "TVStandard"         	# <str>
        #Option     "IgnoreLidStatus"    	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "DefaultTVDACAdj"    	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "Int10"              	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "EXAVSync"           	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "ATOMTVOut"          	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "R4xxATOM"           	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "ForceLowPowerMode"  	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "DynamicPM"          	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "NewPLL"             	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "ZaphodHeads"        	# <str>
	Identifier  "Card0"
	Driver      "radeon"
	VendorName  "ATI Technologies Inc"
	BoardName   "RS482 [Radeon Xpress 200M]"
	BusID       "PCI:1:5:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device     "Card0"
	Monitor    "Monitor0"
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
		Modes	  "1280x800"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Edit: this doesn't seem to be a hardware problem as the screen saver appears to be working on a Linux live CD.

Just tried a PC-BSD live CD this time. Does the same thing as FreeBSD. So I guess this is probably a bug?
 
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