It turns out that xorg will use $HOME/xorg.conf if it finds it, rather than the default in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
I didn’t know this, and didn’t notice that it was telling me this in the logs. I’ve now wasted a bunch of time troubleshooting a font problem on Ubuntu where xorg couldn’t find my fonts and I was working from the WRONG CONFIG FILE. AGH!
Anyway, in other Ubuntu xorg related news, something changed in the latest Breezy upgrades that causes /dev/input/mice not to be created. Xorg then bombs on boot as that’s my core pointer. If you restart udev the device nodes get created fine. Not sure what this is yet.