I also ran into this problem when I updated to Squeeze (xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.8.1). On Lenny it worked fine.
As suggested by Julien, I ran intel_gpu_dump and report the results to fdo's bugzilla: http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24103 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org