LinuxQuestions.org - Browser Freezes System

I asked this question in the Networking forum a couple of days ago, but have received no replies except a request for more information, so perhaps that was the wrong place - I'm definitely a noob, so I'll try again here!

Needing to set up a LAMP system to run some testing on a php-based accounting system, I hauled out an old P2-333, wiped the hard drive and installed Mandriva 10.1. Everything went well until I started Konqueror - it connected and displayed the Mandriva website just fine, but almost as soon as I connected to Google, the entire system locked up. I rebooted and this time the system froze while Konqueror was starting up! - I thought this kind of thing only happened with Windows! :eek: ;)

Figuring there might be a conflict between Mandriva and my hardware, I started over, this time installing Mepis 3.3 only to run into the very same problem using the Mozilla browser.

Just to be certain that the first two tries weren't a coincidence, I once again started over, this time with Xandros 3.0 OCE and sure enough I have the same issue this time using Firefox. So for now I'll stay with Xandros as this does not seem to be related to either the distro or the web browser.

The Linux box is connected (by cable) to a D-Link DI-614+ router which is used by three winXP machines as a wireless access point. It would seem that the networking configuration must be reasonably good or it wouldn't connect to the internet at all, but obviously something isn't quite right and I have no idea where to start looking!

There is 256MB physical memory on board and the control panel appears to indicate that there is still free memory available at the time the lock-up occurs.

With each install, I used whatever the defaults were for partitioning the hard drive. With Xandros it called it something like "use entire disk". Checking the control panel shows reference to a swap partition of 376MB.

/var/log/messages shows only messages dated Feb 2 referring to build-v3-master. I tried monitoring this file by using tail -f but nothing is displayed before the system freezes.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated - if you need any additional information about hardware or system configuration please let me know.

Thanks, Chris.