System lockups

[Reuben A. Popp]

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Morning all :)

I've been experiencing some severe system freezes lately, and I wanted to see 
if anyone might be able to offer any clues/advice on what I might be able to 
do.  The box in question is my main workstation as well as ftp/mail server, 
and is running 4.9-STABLE.

The freezes appear to only happen when I'm in XFree with KDE (at least, I've 
never had it freeze on me with X/KDE not running).  The KDE is version 3.1.4, 
and XFree is 4.3.0 (I believe).  At the point where the box freezes, it stops 
responding to any physical input as well as any network activity.  The 
harddrives do not appear to be spinning either.  I know this is extremely 
vague, but I don't have much of an idea on how to continue.  

So far, I've cvsup'd the latest sources and ports, built world and a new 
kernel (Generic with support for my soundcard.. a soundblaster live 5.1), and 
used portupgrade (portupgrade -arRcC).  I even went so far as to remove my 
~.kde and .kderc to see if that would possibly have any effect.  For a little 
bit (~8 days), it seemed to be doing better, and then it began its deviant 
behavior again.  It has increased in occurance, but still seems to be random, 
beyond the fact that XFree and KDE are running.  :(.

I'm curious to know what might be causing these freezes, as it's never done 
this before.  I did recently replace an older harddrive (80 gigs versus the 
original 8 gigs).  Beyond that, I rarely add or change anything physically.  
Taken from top:

last pid:   844;  load averages:  0.08,  0.10,  0.10    up 0+01:20:36  
21:42:51
57 processes:  1 running, 56 sleeping
CPU states: 15.1% user,  0.0% nice,  5.0% system,  0.4% interrupt, 79.5% idle
Mem: 122M Active, 145M Inact, 56M Wired, 232K Cache, 48M Buf, 51M Free
Swap: 752M Total, 752M Free

One thing I did also recently was totally clear out /tmp (again, to see if it 
had any effect).  It seems to be doing a little better, although I will see 
as time goes on.  Please, any information or help would be greatly 
appreciated, as if I can't figure this out, I'll be forced to replace this 
machine.. something I'm not really able to do financially at this time.  
Please let me know if any other system info or specs are needed, and thanks 
in advance :)

Cheers,
Reuben A. Popp
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