blaster xscreensaver crashes computer?

[Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>]

Hello,

under Debian stable, I found that running the blaster screensaver would 
crash my computer (A T21 Thinkpad laptop computer).

Previously, I thought this was specific to stable, but just previously
my computer locked up with a screensaver that looked suspicuosly like
blaster (no - I am not going to try it again just yet to check ;-).


The symptoms:

console locks up solid, no keystrokes do anything.

occasional the hard disk in use light flashes.

ping from remote system works, gives normal response times.

ssh from remote system suspends, and doesn't do anything.

telnet from remote system:

Trying 192.168.87.132...
Connected to scrooge.chocbit.org.au.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.

this was expected because telnetd is not installed, but I find it
curious that this connection didn't hang too.


So, how can blaster crash my computer so badly that it affects incoming 
ssh connections?


Oh, please CC replies to me, as I am playing around with a new/different 
mail setup (using imap with mozilla), and I am not confident I will miss 
replies. (gnus had a feature where it could highlight replies to an
outgoing message, which I tend to miss here :-( ).


Thanks,

Brian May