Well.. I'm at a complete and total loss of ideas now and I really need to have this issue resolved so I'm not forced to go back to Winblows. I'm going to try reinstalling my OS. Hopefully the issue will go away with that, but I have no idea if that's where the source of the problem is, or if it's a hardware conflict somewhere.. perhaps just a lack of memory on the video card, though I find it hard to believe that 1280MB of RAM on a video card isn't enough, but the issue triggers most frequently when running very much stuff that's graphically demanding.

If you're not using swap you should change the default swappiness value. If you plan on suspending or hybernating you'll want to use swap.

$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

A value of 60 is normally the default. A value of zero would be what one uses when you have no swap. Each with certain risks. I tend towards 20 on mine to keep my HDD usage on the back burner, but available. You don't need a partition for swap, you can use a swap file that you create with dd and format with mkswap and mount with swapon.

Using nice or renice on your apps can help improve the responsiveness of things. But default userland things default to 0, which is the same priority of the X environment on many systems. Bloated apps like most web browsers should launch with a priority larger than 0 but <=20 to keep your X environment responsive.

$ nice -n 18 padsp iceweasel

You seem to have an X or a video driver issue. You might try removing / renaming the xorg.conf file and letting the system default. Video driver issues can be tricky to resolve if you boot to a gui login. I tend towards booting to the CLI and launching X with startx. But my hardware is old enough that I don't have video drivers issues most of the time.

... then you may want to try a live distro with the latest kernel. Aptosid is typically quite cutting edge...

Why change distro? I can simply compile a new kernel, however that can merely make finding problems to be harder. Besides, a distro based on SID sounds very far from an ideal sollution to an issue. Attempting to solve one issue by introducing a potential to many more with an experimental/test source based distro. No thanks, I'll stick with stable, bleeding edge and all problems assosciated isn't my flavour.

I did not suggest to change the distro. I only suggested to try a live system with a more recent kernel to see if that addresses the issue. If it does you can still think about compiling the kernel for your distro of choice... In my mind this is a more stable approach than installing a self-compiled kernel into your main os without even knowing if that's going to help

SID is pretty stable. There's an experimental branch now that's even more bleeding edge. Stable is a relative term, there are a lot of updates in sid, so it's probably not ideal to have a lot of things installed if you're on a slow internet. Or if you need things to always work, with no tollerance of transitional packaging. If you need performance out of relatively low spec'd machines there's not many better choices than SID imo.

Well.. update on this. I cannot get a fresh installation of Kubuntu 13.10 amd64 to work at-all. Either grub can't find the UUID of the drive, or it just goes to a blank screen of endless nothing right after GRUB (if I install & and GRUB not on my RAID.)

So I'm thinking that Kubuntu 13.10 is flat out incompatible to run on my system. (If you want to know what my system is, look toward the bottom of the first page for hardware specs.)

Primary intent is for gaming, so I wanted to go with kubuntu since unity is... well... unity, and many game devs who compile to linux target ubuntu. I'll give 12.10 a shot, see if that's functional for me or not. If not, I'll try out the 14.10(?) or whatever version of 14. Just posting an update on this issue is all.

14.04 is out now. One other though on your hang under heavy use, is that maybe the system is getting too hot. Also if you're on an intel system you probably want to avoid the amd flavor, use the ia64 version if there is one. They're both x86_64, but they are not completely compatible with each other.

My desktop is very well cooled, it's not overheating. Graphics card cannot pass 52C, Processor doesn't get over 84C, and the board sensors I've never seen beyond 35C.
My processor is a desktop variant, not Itanium. It cannot do ia64. ia64 is NOT the same as x86_64, ia64 isn't capable of x86 instruction sets at all. It's for the Itanium intel processor, totally different arcitecture. A typical desktop CPU is not going to be able to handle ia64.

Follow up on issue:

Not resolved.
Amarok just graphically froze up. I had to hide (to tray) and unhide it to be able to load new music.

So, looks like the issue is probably somewhere related to hardware. So, it's time to upgrade the video card I suppose, see if that's the source of the issue.

All my gear is amd, so it seems odd that you'd use an amd64 labelled distro for an intel cpu. I stand corrected I guess, but it's odd that intel would run on amd64 since even at the consumer level, there are differences in opcodes / instruction sets. I guess it really depends on if the compiler(s) play it safe.

84C for the CPU seems hot to me. My old laptop used to run 50C-80C at 82C it would power off. Whenever my systems get unstable, it's normally power, heat, or faulty RAM. In the old days, bad video drivers and versions of X would also do the quirks you've described. But nothing like that for me in the past couple of years. And normally when that happened, you lost keyboard and mouse at the same time, but could ssh into the box if you were configured that way, so not techically locked up.

Yeah, it's just selective applications that stop graphically updating for me. It took days for it to do that again.

84C is hot, but that's only hit at peak 100% load on everything after about 20 min. It's a first gen i7 CPU though, so it's a bit of a heat monster, especially for being undervolted as low as I could get stable.

I really do hope the fault lies on the video card here. I don't want to have to rebuild the entire system when these issues weren't existing when I used Windows. I understand the differences of the two OS's and know this issue cannot be compared, however I didn't have any compatability/hardware issues till I started back on using linux. I can't even boot my system normally. I don't know if it's a matter of 1280M of video RAM not being enough for what I do, or where the problem lies at. I really wish I knew how to figure out what's going on. I just don't know all too much beyond some newbie basic info, how to do rather basic shell scripting, how to compile, how to edit configs/settings, and how to search for info on things I don't know, such as settings for a config file where default only gives basic options/examples and not all.

So.. since this issue still is plagueing me, does anyone have an idea of whether it's possible or not to 'restart' an application's window (or the X window) so things will work as normal again?
With some of the games I play, if I change a setting that respawns the game to apply a graphic setting, it solves the freezing issue.
Is there a way to sort of force doing this without having it close the application or is my question sort of confusing? I'd trying my best to word it understandably.

Hmm, as far as I know you cannot restart Xorg completely without killing the running applications. I know that some window managers (such as e.g. fluxbox) can restart without killing apps, not sure if KDE supports something similar.
Another thing you may want to take a look at is xpra. It's originally intended to attach to and disconnect from x-sessions on remote hosts, but maybe you can misuse it for your problem...