The sympton is that when I start totem on its own, it shows a blue window and immediately terminates with a message like "The error was 'BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)'.\n(Details: serial 69 error_code 11 request_code 141 minor_code 19)".  However, opening a video using totem (like "totem foo.avi") works correctly.

Totem starts correctly on its own if I do "mogrify -resize 50% /usr/share/totem/totem_logo.png".

Using the i810 x.org driver, there appears to be a limitation on the resolution available to xv programs.  The totem_logo.png file appears to be very high resolution, and exceeds this limit on my system.

I would suggest that the image is oversized at 1280x1024: shipping a lower resolution version isn't going to bother anyone.  Even if this is really a bug in xine-lib or X.org, this trivial fix should be made, since latest totem is completely broken on some very common hardware.

I have this problem on both an IBM Thinkpad R50, and on a Dell Dimension 3000.