I think there's a bug in the 24 bit overlay that both the "glint" and "mga" drivers support. On both machines where I have 4.2.0-0pre1v4 installed, one with a matrox millenium II and the mga driver, and the other with a "3Dlabs GLINT Permedia 4" card and the glint driver,
xsetroot -solid "black"
overwrites the _entire_ screen, with only the prompt and the X-cursor
remaining. xrefresh corrects the display. In both cases, I see this
behavior even with Option "NoAccel" set.
Vadim

