Gpm Eats the Disk

[David Baron <d_baron@012.net.il>]

This occurs randomly for no seeming reason for USB mice. It will definitely 
occur if the rodent gets unplugged or at random communications difficulties on 
wireless mice. It can be caused by other USB devices connected or operating:

Gpm starts spewing error messages  syslog and daemon.log grow and grow quickly 
filling the /var filesystem's partition. I mean 10's of gigabytes. The system 
still works but is now crippled, anything really needing /var like mail is 
borked. So is ext3 journaling.

If one notices it in time, one can kill gpm and delete the log files. If it is 
not already too late. Then delete the logs and reboot.

This is a long-standing problem. File a bug against gpm, syslog daemon, ...?
Any fix or preventative work-around?