Several of my relatives use KDE as their desktop environment on Debian/Squeeze, now only one system I am responsible for is i386 and the rest are all AMD64. Apart from one system they all work fine. The problem system is an AMD64 system with a single SATA disk that has a KDE pause periodically, kmail seems to be the most common culprit for triggering it. When it happens all KDE stuff stops working for a while, often logging out (by killing the session from another VT) is the only way to solve it. There are multiple users on that system who have the same problem, so it seems to be a system issue not an issue of one user with messed up KDE configuration. smartctl doesn't report any problems and other disk dependent stuff works OK when KDE isn't responding. Also when it happens there are no D state processes. So it seems that the hard drive is not responsible. Any ideas as to what I should look at to investigate this issue? Switching to GNOME is not a viable option. But as a test I might try running kmail after logging in to a GNOME session next time I visit them. Also the system is online 24*7 and has dynamic DNS configured so I can login at any time. So tests that I can do by reading log files will be preferred to tests that require doing something with the keyboard and mouse. Thanks in advance for any advice. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/