Mysterious Hard Freeze?

[Hart Larry]

Well, this morning I was running xvfb useing firefox to rip an archived stream. 
Also, was running trn in a large news-group.  At some point, I began hearing 
2&1half words looing around from the stream.  I had no speakup, could not 
change consoles, no back space beel, no1 could ssh in here.  So, after 
power-cycling the machine  we see nothing in /var/log/messages relating with 
what happened.
Also, since then 1 of my 4 sound-cards is not showing up-and-that was a hi-end 
which we could adjust bass-and-trebble.
I am not actually running an x session, but I sure wish there were other ways 
of ripping audio, without xvfb-and-firefox, which many times do not shutdown.
Thanks in advance for any ideas in where else to look for clues of what 
happened?  O, this is Debian 2.6.32  because so-far this DecTalk U S B will not 
speak in a later kernel
Hart