Strange bug freezing my laptop

[Julien Olivier]

Hi guys.

I have been trying to solve a bug for about a week now, but I can't
manage to understand what happens:

>From time to time (rather randomly), my CPU gets used at 100% (at least,
my laptop's led blinks a lot), my mouse works (I can move it but not
click) but not my keyboard. Then, about 30 seconds later, even the mouse
stops moving and I have to hard-reboot my laptop.

As I listen to music all day long, it always happens while playing music
(of course it could a coincidence). So, I filed a bug against rhythmbox:
GNOME bugzilla's bug #127814
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127814).

Then, I noticed that it also happened with XMMS and MPG123, as well as
rhythmbox-gstreamer and rhythmbox-xine. I also tried to
activate/deactivate ESD. Same result. Then, I installed ALSA. The freeze
kept happening. Then I saw that Alan Cox advised to append apm=off,
nohlt, or acpi=off to grub.conf to fix a freeze-at-idle bug. I tried all
3 (in combinations or individually), and none helped.

Sometimes it freezes at idle, and sometimes while I'm using my laptop.

I tried letting top run in a visible terminal. But when it froze, i
couldn't see anything special in top.

What's very strange is that it seems to happen very randomly, but tends
to happen more often on the afternoon (around 4pm) after about 15 min of
idle...

I'm really totally lost... please help me solve this very critical bug.

PS: I happily used Redhat 8, then 9 on this very same laptop before and
never had this bug.

PPS: I usually run GNOME-2.4, with Evolution, Rhythmbox and Mozilla.

-- 
Julien Olivier <julo at altern.org>