I run RedHat 9. Default kernel. Updated Gnome to 2.4 with NyQuist rpms. Installed Sun's Java 1.4.2.
Over the last month or so I experienced 4 freezes, 3 of them I'm 100% sure while I was connected by dial-up to the net.

The mouse pointer freezes, the numlock does not repsond to the keyboard. The CTR-ALT-BACKSPACE does not kill the X server. CTR-ALT-Delete does nothing. I have to reset with the button. The system log just says normal stuff and then there's a reset log entry.

It has hapened while doing regular stuff like browsing some images, opening a save as dialog in mozilla, chatting, listening to oggvorbis files. there's not a pattern related with some program I'm using at the moment of the crashes.

I have a couple of FAT 32 partitions, and an ext3 where all things linux go (besides swap).

The PC is a P-III 1GHz, with 256 MB RAM. The video board is a diamond stealth 64 DRAM with 2 MB (S3 Trio64). Motherboard Soyo 7vba (bios version 2AA7). 3Com USRobotics FaxModem V.90 (isa card).

The crashes happen when the system load is not too high. I've edited some big images with the gimp and nothing happened. Other than this I never had any kind of problem on linux; neither a crash nor a kernel panic.

This kind of freeze never happens on windows 98. W98 crashes with errors and inestability as usual, but never freezes like this.

Are there any known problems that might cause this? Does this happen to anyone from time to time or ever at all? Does this *have* to be a hardware failure?

If this is only or mainly happening when your dialing into your ISP or connected, my conclusion would be the software your using or hardware possibly. Can you switch consoles when it freezes or kill X to restart it with ctrl-alt-backspace? Have you tried any other desktops or window managers to test and see if it freezes using those as well?

Also, if you have another box, can you telnet in? If so, what does top show? Is X using 99% of your cpu?

Or does the box hang completely?