nice/renice crashes programs
 

The problem is this: all programs normally run fine. However, they eat waaaayyyy too much CPU power and NEED to be limited (= set lower priority). And here comes the real problem...

Whenever I run programs with lower priority (starting it with "nice" or setting the priority afterwards with "renice"), the programs start to crash constantly. They obviously don't like to run with lower priority and less CPU-power. nice/renice-commands are the only ones I've been using to limit them (setting various limits to /etc/security/limits.conf caused even more crashes).

The system I use is Mandrake 10.1 and basicly any program crashes the same way... at least Firefox, Palantir, Xvnc (TightVNC) and various webcam drivers.

OK, problem solved. :)

The nice/renice-commands were (through another program) adjusting the CPU-time that programs were allowed to use. So whenever a program was using CPU-time more than 3 minutes, the kernel was killing them. Fairly simple issue, but took long to determine the cause for it.