that X/Gnome lockup thing. How to trace it?

[Paul E Johnson <pauljohn ukans edu>]

In my local Linux user group, I mentioned that my RH 6.1 system was
locking up. I'd never had a lockup in linux for 3 years, until Gnome
1.2.1 made its appearance.  Several people chimed in with the same
complaint.  Then I put it together with the mentions of lockups in this
list and I started to wonder if the problem might be widespread.

The symptom as I see it is that the system locks up suddenly, nothing
works. The mouse does not respond, Alt-control-backspace does not work. 
A reset button is the only solution.  I've associated the problem with
heavy RAM usage, when the RAM and swap are near full.

This problem happened to me only on a P-166 with 64 meg RAM. I do not
see it on other systems that have 128 and 256 meg ram, respectively.

After restarting, I do not find any core file to backtrace or any other
hint to explain what went wrong.

I was not sure it was a gnome problem, until several people claimed they
switched back to KDE or dumped gnome in favor of nothing and then the
problem went away.

Paul Johnson
http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn