: ... Shortly after that, my mouse stopped working and I tried
: CTRL-ALT-F[1..4] in an attempt to get back to my standard console and the
: system dies with the typical 'attractive' display of colored ascii
: characters/symbols arranged in vertical bars on the screen.
So, something overwrites your screen memory.
I bet that it is the VC scrolling bug.
I submitted a patch yesterday. Probably it will be fixed
(if I didnt make any mistake) in 1.3.75.
Andries