ongoing graphics problem in [feisty]

[Samuel Thurston, III]

Since shortly after i upgraded to feisty a few months ago, I have not
been able to run any 3D applications.

My chipset is intel 855gm, and whenever i try, from the console, to
run any game or enable desktop effects (which used to work) i get the
following error:

symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libGL.so.1: undefined symbol: drmCloseOnce

If i click on said application in the menu I get no error, just nothing happens.

I could live with this for a while, but honestly now that feisty is
"released" I am severely disappointed that this is not working.  I've
not gotten any response to the few other messages I've posted about
this; does anyone have a workaround?  Is this a known problem?  I
don't even know how to tell what package /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 comes
from so I could try to downgrade the package to one that worked.  am I
the only person on the planet that is having this problem?

I also have a /usr/lib/libgl.so.1.2 so I am wondering if I have a bad
symlink somewhere. Please I am getting desparate here... I have to
spend all my gaming time in WinXP and it's really not making me happy.

Any help at all would be very much appreciated.