problem with 386/ix X windows

[ilan343 at violet.berkeley.edu]

In article <3270 at amelia.nas.nasa.gov> izen at cwru.cwru.edu (Steven H. Izen) writes:
>I am having a problem with 386/ix X windows.  Everyonce in a while it seems
>like certain events are missed.  When I hotkey over the virtual terminal
>from which I started X, there is a message "Problem with ptr:OVERFLOW"
>I checked (via /etc/crash command strstat) the status of my streams and there
>were no failures there.  I increased the streams parameter anyway, as s
>in this newsgroup.  That didn't help.  This has happened under 2.0.1, as
>well as 2.0.2.
>
>One other symptom which may be related-Every once in a while, if I close a
>csh xterm window by typing exit, the xterm goes away, but it leaves the 
>window mapped on the screen. I can iconify it, bu that is somewhat annoying.
>The only way I know to clean it up is to shut down X and restart it.
>
>Does anyone out there have any clue as to what's going on?  
>
Same symptoms here with X-Windows under 1.0.6. In addition, if I
overloaded the system by opening too many windows, it would either
freeze (from which I only recovered by reseting) or started loosing some
screen information (some of the windows wouldn't redraw completely).
It was also very slow.  I was running a 20MHz system with 5MB and a
VGA 800x600 (16 colors).  I recognize this is not an optimal
configuration, would more memory fix it?

A more general question. Is there such a thing as a poor man's 386
X-workstation that works with acceptable performance?
Besides more memory, is a smart graphics card a must for a usable
system?