After gdm is loaded, and waiting for a user to login if a user types *ANY* key into the provided space the screen blanks and never unblanks. I don't know if this is because of the reason discovered last nite ( gdm loaded from init and conflicting with mingetty ) or some other reason. Thus this post.
this was an initscripts interaction problem, and has been fixed in later versions of XFree86/initscripts.