Well- I can only surmise that someone “discovered” a bug in the Xserver. I say this because after updating my desktop the other day, I could not launch my window manager(awesome) using “startx.” Since updates have crashed it(the WM, that is) before, I started there and after about an hour I concluded that the WM was not the problem. It seemed that my WM initialization scripts were not getting run and there was a path problem. Subsequent investigation revealed that an out-of-date script was being used.
Very puzzling, since I hadn’t changed anything. I continued to poke around and double and triple checked my ~/.xsession file. Then I discovered that my .xsession file was not being used at all! It turns out that, way back when I had started using my current WM, I had setup an ~/.xinitrc file which also launched my WM but used the stock init script. I recall migrating to the .xsession file shortly thereafter and have had no trouble since. Well, until last night.
Apparently, the Xserver now checks for a .xinitrc file and runs it if found and does not bother with the .xsession file. I came to this conclusion because after deleting the .xinitrc file from my home directory, awesome launched without issue.
Ah well- no harm, no foul.