System is a mess where should I start

[Paul Frederiks <fred@phoenixstam.org>]

Hi,

ATM my sid box is a mess. All  Gecko based browsers stall or crash at 
least every hour. Mplayer crashes all the time. Pan is slow, openoffice 
is slow, etc. etc. Shutdowns occasionally end up in a kernel panic. 
xterm and gnome-terminal sometimes don't respond to input for multiple 
seconds. Everything is just slow as hell. It seems connected with the 
fact that my broadband connection is bad ATM. The dhcp server fails to 
assign the DSLAM as a gateway (like it always did), so I need to 
manually add the modem as a gateway (which restores a connection). Why 
should this totally wreck the whole system? Suggestions how to fix this?

Thanks in advance,

Paul Frederiks