OpenGL i386 Virtualbox strangeness

[bluegreengold at hushmail.com]

I'm experiencing erratic behavior with opengl in a i386 freebsd.
It's on a fresh install, with only sudo, Xorg, Fluxbox, Blender 
mesademos, and lives installed from ports.  Everything is 
configured correctly AFAIK. I am trying to run an opengl program 
from an xterm window.  The problem I am having is that after 
successfully running a single instance of an application using 
OpenGL, if I terminate the program, ie the gears demo from mesa-
demos, further attempts to run an opelgl application fails.  The 
output I get is this:

$gears
OpenGL Warning: XGetVisualInfo returned 0 visuals for 0x28bf6d00
OpenGL Warning: Retry with 0xd1 returned 1 visuals
OpenGL Warning: XGetVisualInfo returned 0 visuals for 0x28bf6d00
OpenGL Warning: Retry with 0xd1 returned 1 visuals
1785 frames in 5.00 seconds = 357.00 FPS
2614 frames in 5.00 seconds = 522.800 FPS
$ gears
OpenGL Error: packspuConnectToServer: no connection on first create!

I experienced the same packspuConnectToServer error with a more 
complex install, sometimes programs would run, but then after a 
single instance, not run again. Sometimes they would never run from 
a cold boot.  Rebooting doesn't necessary resolve the issue.  
However, even without rebooting, waiting for a while   seems to 
reset something and I can connect again (at least some of the 
time). (I just checked now after 20 minutes and gears would run 
again, once, and then the same error).  The behavior seems rather 
temperamental, and I don't know where I should be looking.

Is there an openGL guru out there who has any idea of what I need 
to do so that I can connect to the server reliably?  thanks