Re: Netscape causing a reboot

[awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

> Hello all.  I have changed my email address recently but I used to be 
the guy
> at the other end of "tandwg@earthlink.net" if that means anything to 
anyone.
> At any rate, I have a user (it's me, the non-root user I use while 
dinking
> around) that when I Netscape 4.61 my machine would just reboot, just 
like that.
>  No unmounting of filesystems, no term signal being send to all 
processes.
> Now, as a trouble-shooting measure, I renamed the users ~/.netscape 
directory to
> ~/.debuggingnetscape and there were no problems with running the 
browser...
> Can anyone point me to a possible problem file within /.netscape that 
I can nuke
> or edit so that I can retain my other settings?  It's not critical, I 
can just
> nuke the whole directory and I wouldn't lose anything important, I 
just want to
> know what's under the hood.

This is really stinkin' weird, and I suspect a hardware problem coming 
into play.  Try copying the bad .netscape folder to another name,  
deleting the old one, and renaming the old one to ".netscape".  If you 
follow this procedure exactly none of the .netscape files will be in 
the same position on the disk as the old ones,  and see if they still 
cause a reboot.  Just in case it is a bizarre action caused by a 
quasi-bad sector on your drive.

The only other "probable" possibility is netscape causing a buffer 
overflow in the Xserver that faults the card in some way and reboots 
the machine.

A memory problem I imagine would manifest itself in other ways as 
well, such as seg. Faults, signal 11's,  and possibly really lousy 
performance.