Mysterious Freezing (Solved)

[Lokheed]

I have been having mysterious freezes and have even re-installed Gentoo from scratch to no avail.

Here is the meat of the problem. My system freezes on numerous events. The most common is launching a program in Gnome. It can be gedit, GAIM, X-Term, Thunderbird (binary from mozilla.org, not compiled by me) or (and this one really bothers me) it has frozen several times at:

>>> Regenerating /etc/ld.so.cache...

It stops at that line and nothing. The thing about the freezing is that I can toggle over to another vterm (ALT+F2, etc) and can type but if I try to run any commands, that part gets frozen too. I have to do a hard reboot.

I have tested hardware and Memtest shows no faults on my RAM (4 passes).
I have re-installed Gentoo from scratch and the problem still remains.
I have tried difference kernels
I am at a complete loss

This showed up a few days ago and has not gone away. Compiles go fine which shows that it is not CPU temp. There is no huge load at the time of freeze (sometimes nothing is running under Gnome).

The two most isolated spots are launching programs in Gnome (which I can kill but cannot run cli afterwards, though I can switch terms and log in as root on another one) and the regenerating of /etc/ld.so.cache. The latter being the only "freeze" in cli.

No other errors, no other problems. My system is not usable in this way and this is my last hope. I am hoping someone can narrow down the possible causes as I dont have time to keep recompiling my system over and over.

Where to launching programs and /etc/ld.so.cache both correlate? Any help, anything at this point is so very much appreciated. I have tried everything and so far have only found these two correlations and have but ruled out hardware issues as I have just bought this system and it showed up completely out of the blue.

I am wondering, could it be a bad config file in the kernel? I have moved and switched kernels and have been using this config file for ages but my kernel compiled just fine. Anything you guys can think of, or heard of something like before?
_________________
You're not afraid of the dark are you?

[dboli42]

Can you give a little information about your system (x86, amd64, ppc), video card etc?

[Lokheed]

AMD64 3000+ running under ~x86
GCC 3.4.4
Videocard is ATI Radeon 9200SE running without DRI (AGP Support) on the Xorg-X11 internal drivers
revdep-rebuild shows no problems

I can rule out video problems. I thought maybe it was the ATI drivers and dumped them and never re-installed them. The thing is they are hard locks. I can still do things, Gnome doesnt crach just becomes unresponsive. The time still works, my mouse still moves, I can still close certain programs, windows, but some (nautilus for example) is unresponsive.

I am also stymied about problems in cli (regenerating of /etc/ld.so.cache). I am most frustrated...

I know most would explain the problem with running under ~x86 but to just show up in the last few days and still remain. It would be great if it was an offending package and I can just bring it back but I dont know what could be causing these types of problems. What package could be the culprit?
_________________
You're not afraid of the dark are you?

[dboli42]

When this happens have you tried alt-ctrl-backspace? Also, look at /var/log/Xorg.*.log, if the problem is X related it might show up there. If you can close X without freezing things completely look at dmesg, and maybe post the last part of it.

[Lokheed]