Whats going here? PC freezes up/screen greys out etc

[oxf]

Hi.... any thoughts on this annoying and persistent problem?

My Specs:

!0.04 Lucid running on:
Compaq Presario M2000 Notebook
Processor: AMD Turion 64
Graphics: ATI Radeon Xpress 200M
1GB Ram

OK here's the story. I have had this happen only while using Firefox 3.6.8. This never happened with previous releases but they were using older versions of Firefox. That said I can't be 100% sure it's a FF issue but I think it is.

I'll be online and suddenly the display will grey out, the CPU and will ramp up and I will loose control of the PC. Often it will return after a few seconds but not always. If control doesn't return I am usually screwed and can't even shut the system down.

Initially I was thinking it was a Flash problem and both FF plugin Container and FF bin would be consuming vast ammounts of the CPU. Now though I'm not so sure. I've tried deleting the FF profiles and starting again but this doesn't help either. A week ago I took the radical approach and completely deleted the partition and reinstalled a new version of 10.04.1 All was fine until a couple of days ago.

But it started again. The screen greys out, everything freezes and I have no mouse/keyboard control. I tried to open terminal and no response. I try to shut down and my desktop icons dissapear, then the top/lower pane and I'm left with just the background and the cpu fan running full blast.

This last time I had terminal open with top running just in case. Problem stars again, greys out/freezes up etc and what I notice is Nautilus is using 99+% of the CPU. At the same time I loose my icons, panel toolbars etc.

Now this is a fresh instalation so what on earth's going on? It's happening on only one of my PC's The only other thing thats popped up is I've got an error message of "input/output error" a few times both in the Shell or again today struggling to get Terminal open or the pull down menu to restart the system. Hardware issue?

Can anyone suggest what I might try to even start to diagnose this problem? Anything at all as I'm stumped..
Thanks

[Rubberman]

Try another version of the browser, or install chrome in order to eliminate some interaction with FF and your system.

[glene77is]

Mike,

I have had similiar experience with 'greying out'
and not while running FireFox.
Does not seem to be the browser.
I have tried Dooble browser with good sucess and I've tried four other browsers just for the experience, and still get the seldom-occassional 'greying out', like Ubuntu is going to 'sleep' mode. Have not experienced anything like that with DSL, Puppy, Knoppix. I still don't know what the 'greying out' is, but for me the display eases back on to life if I just can move the mouse a little.

On the other hand, different seldom-occassional problem on boot-up, wherein the mouse runs upside-down and backwards, and high speed. Difficult to place it on the Terminate icon (upper-right corner) but then 'cursor key down' works and I can 'return' (to shutdown) works. So, I do the Microsoft trick and re-boot. Seldom happens, but I wish I knew what it is doing.

The computer does not know me from Adam's house-cat,
and does not give a flip.
Linux works great, and I have a second machine set-up just for learning.

Good Luck.