machine hanging FC2T3 release for AMD64 on nForce3 Gigabyte K8N Pro

[jerry]

Hi all:

In a fit of somewhat misguided inspiration I installed the complete FC2 
Test 3 for AMD64 on an Gigabyte K8N Pro mobo with nvidia nforce 3 with 
AMD64 3000+, 512 meg DDR400, Maxtor 6Y120P0 120 gig hard drive, IO Magic 
CDRW 5232, Maddog GeForceFX5200 video using NV34, RTL-8169 Gigabit 
ethernet, TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller unused.

It's been locking up mysteriously. 

the hardware was not exactly what i had seen on lists as working before 
another machine went down and hastened a new machine build.  the exact 
mobo was another $100+ up and already over budget, so i thought i'd have 
somewhat of a project on my hands.  ran NON AMD64 FC1 without these 
problems.

Symptoms include GKrellM system monitor shows little activity but moves 
along so CPU working and not complete "hang", mouse pointer tracks, but 
no activity on clicks, control-alt-del doesn't, forcing a reset switch, 
file system integrity check, etc.

The installer may have caused the other grub partitions unbootable 
unless i've been rooted or somesuch as the older /boot is seen as 
empty.  the other partition data appears accessible luckily so far.  
FC2T3's K3b burned older FC1 partition data ok.  I'd rather go forward 
to final FC2 than back to FC1, but the hanging is getting annoying...

I'm not running much besides vanilla FC2T3.  Additions listed below:

Compiled and installed Gnotime (a newer name for Gnome Time Tracker) 
with some policy errors, but appears to runs ok.

Mucked with NVIDIA drivers but it's a little fuzzy what exactly I did 
with NVIDIA in the excitement of a 64 bit release.  For some reason i 
thought i needed the nvidia drivers for better nForce3 support. little 
did i (and still don't) know...

Looking for MP3 support for xmms from GURULabs, one of which killed the 
regular sound, so I went  to the helix player hxplay from helixcommunity 
(which doesn't give graphical icons, but otherwise seems to work ok for 
.mp3s if willing to drill down directories repeatedly since it loses 
your last directory use).

the prelink daemon process is somewhat of a surprise when it kicks in.

as you might have already guessed, i'm not a kernel hacker yet...  and 
this is a mess, but i thought it would be important to let some people 
know before general release that there may be a problem here.  any other 
specifics i can look up please let me know.

any help in troubleshooting appreciated,
jerry