I installed Fedora Core 4 Test 2 in a spare partition to see if the supplied X server would solve the Radeon 9200 16-bit/24-bit problem. No dice. Ended up installing a Radeon 9550SE card instead, which works OK.
After trying FC4t2, I had a devil of a time switching back to Fedora Core 3, because the FC4 kernel and modules decided that my serial ATA disk drive should be called /dev/sde instead of /dev/sda. Apparently the 1394 drive support was claiming four SCSI drive device names for drives not yet plugged in. Ugh.
Anyhow, once I got FC3 booting again, I tried switching from the Sapphire Radeon 9200 card to a Sapphire Radeon 9550SE card. That solved the problem. The software thinks that it’s a Radeon 9600 AS, using an RV350 AS chip, but it works great.
I was really hoping to stick with the 9200 because it has open-source 3D support, while the later cards don’t. But I’m not actually using 3D, so I guess it doesn’t matter.
I’m still surprised that this problem hasn’t been widely reported. I wonder if the bug only occurs on 64-bit processors (in 64-bit mode)? I’m running on an Athlon 64 3500+.