Well, it took about 2 seconds to find the answer at the gnome website. I'm just trying it now. I don't seem to have the xscreensaver daemon running by default; that's probably key...
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53860 This is not a bug, as it turns out, just a feature with difficult-to-find documentation :) Xscreensaver 3.32 comes with gnome 1.4 from Ximian. In the xscreensaver changelog for (I think) version 1.30, it explicitly states that xscreensaver takes over all DPMS control. I happened upon the easy way to fix my DPMS control by executing the Xscreensaver graphical control program: xscreensaver-command -prefs ...RickM...
