[ale] suddenly finding computer 'seized-up'....

[cc.thomas at earthlink.net (Courtney Thomas)]

Recently several times I've left my computer downloading for extended 
periods to return to a frozen machine, i.e. not working are the mouse, 
keyboard or monitor but the box itself is still running; and, of course, 
the only way to resume is...a hard reset. Fortunately, this has not 
resulted in disaster. I've fsck'd all the partitions before rebooting 
and, seemingly nothing critical has been lost.

I should mention that often but not always, when I try to print from 
Mozilla 1.7.7 [not Firebird, but rather Mozilla/5 Gecko 20051115] I get 
a core dump. This usually occurs after Mozilla has been running awhile, 
not when first started. I wonder if all this is from a Mozilla memory 
leak and if so, how can I tell ? Or should I just upgrade Mozilla [HOW 
?] to remove this suspect, or is the recent version equally likely to 
repeat.

I also ran memtest86 and discovered nothing.

I'm intermittently getting a stream of sio [sio1, irq=3] overflows,  the 
mouse is on com1 and modem on com2.

Nevertheless, clearly, I need to resolve this ASAP.

A suitable algorithm [or a pointer to same] pertaining to hard&soft-ware 
resolution...would be appreciated.

Gratefully,

Courtney