One possibility occurs to me:

Depending on the version of NetBSD (or the X server?), is it possible that
the console is simply left in some unreadable mode, rather than strictly
unusable?

I know that X tends to leave garbage on a console for me when I quit X.  
I also recall that once or twice it has also modified the foreground text
color.  If it set your text to black, it might _appear_ that nothing was
being rendered, even though NetBSD was responding to commands and printing
(black text on black background) results onto your screen.

Can you do something such as ``startx'' or ``find /'' which would produce
observable results?  (The former should restart your X server; the latter
should generate a lot of disk activity.)

(X also has a habbit of leaving garbage characters hanging on the console
input, so you may need to backspace over the garbage...)


I don't know if that will help any, but it's worth a try, perhaps.  Good
luck.


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  --rkr@rkr.kcnet.com