intel x3100 and no desktop effects

[zer]

Kay, so yesturday, while playing around in the depths of my linux install I broke something by hitting the media direct key on my dell 1420. So I decided to check out the new beta for pc-bsd. anyways, for some reason it wouldn't install to a seperate partition, i retried on the whole drive and it worked, so i didn't get to see what the issue was there. but anyway, i try enabling desktop effects because i know that my card should support it, and everything disappears. i log out go into safe mode disable desktop effects. since i know the driver should work, unless it's drastically behind the linux one, i go online to find out who else's had this problem. i find that uninstalling the i810 drivers may help. i try that, restart, try again and while desktop effects don't work it atleast didn't break anything.
Unfortunately, i have school work to do and don't have time to debug this. so i'm going to reinstall linux, and try to do a partition install again. if it doesn't work it may be another bug i've found (the md5 checksums all seem good.)