Help diagnosing a lockup

[Federico Tello Gentile]

Well, after I added the logging code to my /etc/rd.d/rc.local script
the lockup showed up once more (call me lucky, I guess :-) ).
I can confirm the lockup is total, the log stopped at the time
everything freezed. I waited 3 minutes with everything hanged but
nothing was logged in those minutes.

The code I was running is:
while true; do date >> /var/log/alive ; sync ; sleep 60 ; done &

Maybe some higher priority can be added to that command, so it runs
even on high load moments?

This time the hangup happened when I clicked the edit menu in
Rhythmbox, the menu was about to be drawn (a gray box appeared where
the menu was about to appear) and everything locked.

Can soft reboots from windows 98 affect the Linux drivers (by leaving
the hardware in a strange state)? This time I was using it after
rebooting from windows 98.
I sometimes lose the sound system when booting from windows but
recover sound after rebooting again.