On 27-07-2006 20:19, Art Haas wrote:

Hi.

I've got Fedora Rawhide running on a SMP PIII machine, and the latest
kernels from Fedora have been locking up when I run 'yum update' to
get the latest packages. I also experience lock-ups when I use
Firefox to do some web browsing. Not all my network usage results in a
lockup, however. I can usually do 'git pull' and update git itself or
my copy of Linus' kernel tree without problems, as well as update my
GCC repo with subversion and Mozilla with cvs. I realize that running
Fedora Rawhide means when things break I can keep the pieces, so
the lockups or other occasional issues are not unexpected.

I don't know the numbers of this kernels, but did you try 
linux-2.6.18-rc2.

It has some great patch to queue scheduler by Hubert Xu. I think 
it is some Gnu/miracle that it has been working (mostly) under 
heavy load without this patch.

But there are also other possibilities...

Jarek P.