Ok, on my MythTV box I would occasionally get freezes where Ctl-Alt-Backspace would not work, or I'd get a call from the wife and need to restart X remotely from work.
On Fedora 10 I found a handy command, gdm-restart which worked quite nicely. After upgrading to F12 it was gone, then I found gdm-stop which seemed to do the same thing. Now that I'm on F14, neither command is available and I haven't found a suitable replacement.
Of course init 3 && init 5 will get the job done but it causes unnecessary stop and starting of services.
Thanks, Richard