Okay. After pushing to the beta of "Hardy heron", one of the games works (albeit extremely slow and without sound effects) and the other fails without crashing X, so I suppose this thread is over, though I am still getting those slow framerates you spoke of with glxgears in -fullscreen, and they also do not appear to change size in fullscreen. Still, it seems these are graphics driver issues with this particular machine now and I will have to go elsewhere to try and get them sped up.
