Arch Linux conked out!

Well, sort of. After an update, with only a few packages updated, I noticed
that the Conky window was weirdly colored and fuzzy. It was fine when I
restarted, but then I noticed the following: (1) cgdb didn't work right, it
shown one line of the startup at a time, and the typed commands weren't shown
at the "(gdb)" prompt; (2) bringing up the Fluxbox desktop menu would show only
a the first few x pixels at the right edge of the monitor; (3) running an app
would bring it up partly obscured, and shrunk horizontally, at the right of the
desktop; (4) the main menu bar [File, Edit, etc] items would not show the menu,
though I could hot-key to 'em.

This also happened in Xfce4. I installed GDM and Gnome, and that worked. But a
totally different work flow for me.

I then commented out lines in my ~/.xsession until I found that commenting out
my Conky command-lines worked. Also running the stock Conky configuration
worked.  Anyway, I changed the "own_desktop_type" from 'panel' to 'desktop',
and then no problem.

Wonder what went wrong. Not wanting to grok the source code at this time to get
a clue. Also not very knowledgable about Xorg internals.

--
It was all so different before everything changed.