This happened in 9.0, too. Occasionally the computer will lock up with a kernel panic and the program that caused it is the seti@home one. Sometimes this is after a month or two, other times it happens after a week. I tried getting the exact message to paste here, but can't figure out which log it would be in (i.e. what type of error it is classified as). Any ideas? I have tried using the crontab method that is in the readme with SETI@home and have tried placing it in my rc.local file and have tried just manually running it when I first restart the computer and none of them seem to fix it. Here is what the command is...

./startseti -nice 19 -proxy (local SETI proxy server) > /devnull 2> error.log

I have tried checking that error.log and it doesn't show anything. I also tried it one time without using the proxy and it still did that. I just use that proxy so it caches like 10 WUs so that if the seti servers are down the computers can still crunch numbers. This is the only thing that's keeping my computer from not running for two years straight well, that and I'll probabably switch to another distro by that time.

You're just wasting your cpu cycles anyway.
There's nothing out there.

I'm wasting cpu cycles by not using it, figure I have the processor, might as well use the thing. Just strange that it does it every once and a while, it's not like it does after a week or something

It may be hanging up when it actually detects extraterrestrial intelligence!