Xorg 7.4 keyboard/terminal problem

[lhecking at users.sourceforge.net]

 I decided to give Xorg 7.4 another go and I'm getting a bit further now
 than a few weeks ago. Not needing an xorg.conf file is nice, but I suppose
 it is still needed if one wants to use xfs or the nvidia driver.

 The nvidia driver (180.29) makes the system near unusable. While X runs and
 the familiar gnome desktop pops up after login, gnome-terminal doesn't run,
 and I didn't try any other apps then:

The program 'gnome-terminal' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadName (named color or font does not exist)'.
  (Details: serial 275 error_code 15 request_code 45 minor_code 0)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)
The program 'gnome-session' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.

 The nv driver works a lot better in this regard, but there are a few
 interesting features: none of the diacritics (accent characters) work
 as expected, even though X+hal seem to figure out that I have a "gb"
 keyboard. Many of these keys need two keypresses for some character to
 appear, and it's not necessarily what I expect.

 Backtic, caret and tilde ` ^ ~ need two keypresses to appear.
 Pressing the UK pound sign ? key onces creates a literal "\c2\a3".
 Single and double quote ' " need two keypresses and they create a
 literal "\c2\b4" and "\c2\a8", resp. (not sure about the exact hex
 values as they are represented differently on the Linux system I'm
 typing this on).

 FreeBSD 7.1, current ports, gnome 2.24.