X broken on Radeon 9700 laptop

[bloch verdurin com]

Just thought I would mention here that I've been stuck using the Vesa
driver on my laptop for about a month now, as X is unusable with the
current Xorg ATI driver.  Using Vesa makes the CPU fan run almost
constantly and is somewhat less than ideal.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=203341

This broke in July, started working again and is now broken.

Is anyone else seeing something similar?

Adam