Intermittent (but frequent) problem with FC6.

[Bob St John]

Folks,

I have an intermittent (but frequent) problem with FC6. At first I
thought it was a hardware problem, but now I don't think it is.

This is a dual boot system. Windows XP does not crash at all, but FC6
crashes frequently.

uname -a output: Linux Linux 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 #1 SMP Mon Oct 16
14:39:22 EDT 2006 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Other facts:
- Memtest completes multiple passes without detecting any problems
- Both FC6 and WinXP are on the same hard disk (and since WinXP works
fine I don't think it's a disk or disk controller problem.)
- Same logic as above for the power supply.
- Logging in text mode causes no problems; logging in with either GNOME
or KDE crashes the system 99% of the time after a short period of time.
- The other 1% of the time FC6 seems stable for at least several hours.
In fact earlier this week it was up for 3 or 4 days with relatively
heavy usage with no problems.
- Periodically, in GNOME, straight but zig-zagged brown lines appear on
the display.
- As root, I can bring up the KDE environment but not the GNOME
environment. As other users I can bring up both GNOME and KDE.
- The crashes happen most frequently when I'm using Evolution, but since
I use that more than anything else this may not be very indicative.
- When crashes occur the display freezes but the mouse moves freely.
- When crashes occur the only thing I can do is physically power off the
machine. When I turn it back on it boots quickly with only this
indication of errors: "usb 1-3: cannot allocate device 2 error -110" or
something close to that.
- I don't know too much about Linux, but I see no error messages from
dmesg or in /var/log/messages
- Thinking that this has something to do with X11, I have deleted the
xorg.conf file and rebuilt it with system-config-display (several
times.)

So I'm at a loss at resolving this problem. Any suggestions?   

Thanks . . .

Bob St. John