Somebody in the thread at some point said: > the mouse. And then the system freezes, but the CPU monitor in the > panel sometimes keeps going and shows 100% CPU use, and the disk light > is going nuts. Sometimes though, the screen doesn't update and I > don't see that. Sounds compatible with some driver entering in a tight loop doing printk()s which are going into /var/log/messages at a rate of knots. It would be great if you could provoke it while in VT1, ie, Ctrl-Alt-F1, because you will see a copy of any log spew in there... if indeed that is what it is. You should see the end of any panic that way as well, which can be expected since you have the blinking keyboard lights sometimes. -Andy
