Hi again
Sorry for my late reply;
I think I've narrowed down the problem to the libaries used by amule, wxGTK and the like. I reformatted and reinstalled mandriva, and the system was working fine...as soon as I installed amule and its pre-requisites, the problem would manifest itself on the subsequent reboot. I've got TwinView working now with the same xorg.conf so I think I'll live without amule for the moment and concentrate on getting my system back the way it was.
Thanks anyways
