fc5 hangs

[David L]

[snip]
>>>Two days in a row my fc5 computer has frozen soon after I start using it 
>>>in the morning.
[snip]
>
>You might try installing the synaptics mouse driver from the repos.

It appeared to be installed already.  yum install synaptics said there
was nothing to do.

>After it is installed, it might help if you run
>system-config-display --reconfig
I tried that, but not until after today's hang.

However, I have more information about the problem.  I think I misdiagnosed 
the problem...
it appears that the mouse/keyboard are not completely unresponsive... 
they're are just
responding extremely slowly.  I ssh'd into my work computer (the one that is 
"hanging"
every day) from home last night.  This morning before I came to work, I 
tried to do a little
work from my ssh session.  And it was messed up too!  Things were running 
very slowly.
I tried to run top and it took a few minutes to even start.  Once it 
started, it was usually
quite responsive (even when a second ssh session was still sluggish) but 
sometimes
stopped responding for ~10 seconds.  When it was running, it didn't show any 
process
hogging the CPU and the load average was only around 2-3.  There was not a 
whole lot
of free memory, but I freed up some memory by killing a few processes and 
the problem
didn't go away.  I killed evolution, evolution-exchange, etc.  I tried to 
run a command in
my (autofs mounted) home directory and it gave some error that I 
unfortunately can't
remember.  I restarted autofs (which took about 5 minutes) and I was able to 
access my
home directory again, but the system was still sluggish.  I noticed that the 
clock was ~3
hours behind despite the fact that ntpd was running.  I also noticed that 
some daily cron
stuff was running (namely prelink).  I stopped crond and killed everything 
that crond had
started.  It was still extremely slow.  Finally, I came to work and tried to 
interact with it
locally and saw similar behavior to what I see about once per day.  I tried 
to log out
from  my X session to see if that would help, but I only waited 10 minutes 
for it to log out.
It did seem to be slowly closing windows and logging out, so it might have 
worked if I
waited an hour, but I finally got impatient and pushed the reset button.

Any thoughts on what could be causing this behavior?  It acts like the CPU 
is overloaded
or we're out of memory and swap, but that is not the case.

Thanks...

               David

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