k3b race condition with mp3?

[kh]

I have used k3b successfully for some time, burning dvds, data music for 
a while on both dvdrs and cd's.
But lately k3b sometimes when i burn mp3 get the whole fedora to a 
standstill, the harddisk works overtime and cant even bring up the 
screen after one hour working :)
I have been able to shutdown as root though(ctrl-alt+f2) and got no 
errors through the shutdown process.
Today the same happened and i got a bunch of errors (when shutting 
down), it told me that highmem was 0 and i was out of memory for each 
gnomeapplet/program that had a processid (probably).

I have fc2 installed with the 2.6.8-1.521 kernel, latest k3b, running 
gnome (that followed fc2), latest xorg-x11, updated last night in hope 
to solve this issue.
My box: athlon 1.33, 512 mb ram, nvidia geforce2 32 mb...

My question is where to look in my box for some useful info that i can 
try to solve this issue? im for sure running out of memory.

Btw, could the xserver also be involved in this memory issue?

Thanx for reading my sloppy english ;)

kh