screen's background going black and super irritating gesture's driven GUI ...

[Albretch]

I need to use knoppix 6.7.1 (dvd version) because I need to use its ANSI C and ANSI C++ compilers for some projects:

$ uname -a Linux Microknoppix 3.0.4 #12 SMP PREEMPT Thu Sep 8 05:27:05 CEST 2011 i686 GNU/Linux

there are however two really annoying things with that version of knoppix.

1) the screen's background tends to go black (except the title bar) and what is supposed to be black (background of terminal windows) turns white. I don't think it is related to the monitor at all or the hardware it is run on because I use it with different hardware bases at work and at home. It seems to be related to fat finger typing and I haven't been able to notice exactly which keys did I press (or at which speed?) or how to turn the display back to its proper state

2) also, there is this new super irritating thing about windows opening and closing in funky ways, as well as closing and moving around the display when you are trying to reach them with the mouse, which I really, really, really would like to stop how can you have your windows opening and closing as they used to?

I think these two problems relate to each other because when I have like 5 of those funky windows open, the screen turns black.

I remember not long ago that on one version of knoppix the background of terminal windows had some stupid transparency for "visual effects" some "visually motivated" people would say

How could you troubleshoot/reconfigure those problems?

lbrtchx