help with seg fault in aptitude and booting xen

[whollygoat@letterboxes.org]

This is a recently installed firewalling router/gateway
running Lenny.  For two or three days it has been 
running for long periods with no interruptions in 
connectivity or with booting.

p3 500Mhz slot 1 
seanix columbia sx mobo
   i440bx chipset

Today it suddenly died in the middle of my web browsing.
Didn't think to write down the message on the console
(figured it would be in the logs) but it was an "end trace"
message like the one below.

When I rebooted with a xen'ified host kernel, the boot 
dropped to an initramfs prompt after waiting a couple of 
minutes for the root file system.

I booted the non-xen kernel thinking that having only just 
removed two xen meta packages.  When I tried to run ncurses
aptitude, the screen was drawn but then stopped with an 
"Ouch! segmentation fault".  

I was able to reinstall the two metapackages with command line
aptitude.  Started to surf the web some more and the machine 
died again with the (by hand, so the spacing, capitalization, 
etc might be wrong)

    [3700.929083] EIP: [<c017119ad>] cache_alloc_refill+0xe5/0x44d 
    ss: ESP 0068:def89dcc
    [3700.929083] ---[ end trace 794d24/daccc4879f ]---


So I tried rebooting with the xen kernel.  As above, the boot
process dropped to initramfs command prompt after waiting one or 
two minutes for the root file system.

Anybody understand what the above means?

Thanks,

willy
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  whollygoat@letterboxes.org

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