Heh. sometimes in computerland, part of the solution is right under your nose. Just on a hunch, I right clicked on the Xine interface, and in the menu there, the second item was "Show video window". So I clicked that, and guess what...a picture. Now, why would Xine defaulting to not showing the video window, and more importantly, how can I fix that?

There's now another problem-I seems to to lose control of the mouse and keyboard in Xine. If I then run Top, and kill Xine, eventually, hitting ESC sometimes brings cursor control back. Is this the infamous "menu focus" issue or is it something entirely different?