Debian gone flaky.

[styl0]

Alright. I've been running Debian since early 2004, with seemingly no problems, just a random apt-get dist-upgrade every now and again, but I haven't run one since the stable lease of Etch, and I've always kept the PC up to date.

Well, about 3 months ago, I decided to take a hiatus from the internet, and didn't keep it regularly updated like I used to, BUT it was disconnected from the internet. About 2 days ago, I decided to pop back on, and whatnot, and now programs take 3-5 minutes to start up, and when they do, they instantly freeze. When I issue "shutdown -r now" or "reboot" it shuts down fluxbox/gnome/kde, and stops at the command line screen, which, I obviously can't type in, because it's in the middle of a shutdown process. And it freezes right there, not going any further, and I have to use the power button to turn the PC off.

After my grub screen shows up I see an error about the new "xen" kernel that some how installed itself when I last issued "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -fy --force-yes" which was about 7 hours ago. I tried to remove JUST the "xen" kernel, and it wanted to remove my regular kernel.

When I boot back up. I see a few "failed!" but that's because of apache (uninstalled it, and it just keeps trying to restart it for some reason).

When Fluxbox/gnome/kde load up, everything loads ungodly slow, except for Pidgin, Xterm, and Synaptic, and I don't know why, but it's growing increasingly annoying.

The computer specs are as follows:
Intel P4 3.06 Dual core, 768mb DDR SDRAM, 2x160GB WD internal HDD's, 500GB WD external HDD (USB), Onboard VID, NIC. No real "add-ons" (I know the HDD info probably isn't needed)

Does anyone out there know if it's a hardware issue, or a software issue? And since I obviously can't check this board again, unless I steal my roommates laptop for a little bit again, anyone with a solution can feel free to email me, or contact via AIM, my screen name is on my profile..

Thanks.

[styl0]

Hum, for some weird reason, I ran memtester on the ram on this PC, it came back ok, and the random freezing/crashing/general annoyance went away.

Thanks anyways.