File-system trashed a number of times and this seemed to be associated with a mounted cdrom. One trashing forced a reboot. Unfortunately the typescript file was lost in the following e2fsck. Could you be more specific how it trashed the filesystem? Output from e2fsck would be a good start. Could you also try getting the panic message? Or even better, a backtrace from gdb. OK folk, what is causing the problem? The smurfs. =)