Gnome crashing/freezing on testing machine

[Julian Gilbey <jdg@polya.uklinux.net>]

Hi all!

I'm running an up-to-date testing machine.  In the last week or so,
GNOME has crashed several times, freezing the screen.  While I can
just about log in remotely (even that then hangs on several
occasions), I can't even kill the GNOME process (kill -9 failed on
several processes running under GNOME).  That's really weird, and I've
never seen this sort of behaviour before.

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing it, or how I could
diagnose this problem?  I'm sure there's a grave bug somewhere here,
but I haven't a clue where.

I can provide lots more info if that is of use.

Thanks,

   Julian