[ale] Strange hangs with Mandrake 9.2 & GNOME

[Michael D. Hirsch]

You may have heard me mention that I have my wife using Linux, now.  She has a 
nice fast hyperthreading CPU, plenty of RAM, CDRW, DVD reader--in short, she 
should be a happy camper.

I recently upgraded her to Mandrake 9.2 with the latest OpenOffice, GNOME, and 
Evolution and suddenly weird stuff is happening.  Her system will suddenly 
hang for a few seconds, then restart.  Internet activities (http and POP 
mail, for example) seem very slow.

As she was complaining I started watching her machine from my laptop.  It was 
not returning pings very well--sometime not at all, and sometimes with 5 
second delays.  I logged on to her machine and pinged the mail server--it was 
showing the same problems.  I could ping it fine from my laptop.

Later I logged on to her system.  I was running top, then I started xosview 
which is a graphical system monitor.  xosview show 100% CPU usage, but top 
didn't show any process using much CPU.  This lasted about 5 seconds, then 
stopped and I couldn't get it to recur over the next hour.

Any clues or suggestions?  I'm running two other Mandrake installations 
without trouble, though they tend to be in KDE, not GNOME.

Thanks,

Michael