When you get in a situation like this, sometimes it's helpful to enable sshd and have a session ssh'd to the troublesome machine while messing with X. If X breaks, just pkill the process from the ssh session and you're back in the driver's seat.
I've had the nv driver on OpenBSD lock the machine up like that, and this ssh trick works wonders (for debugging...I wouldn't want to do this for daily use haha)
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