Help - Broken Linux

[caveman_piet]

Hi
- I'm running RH 7.3 - upgraded from 7.1
on an Asus a7v133 mobo and a 1.5GH AMD processor
with 512MB memory.
Upgraded to Kernel 2.4.18-5 about 16 Jun '02.

Everything was fine and now suddenly -
a) the system reboots (like pressing the reset
button) when KDE is active for a few hours
and actually doing nothing.
b) leaving the system in console mode or firing up Gnome it stays on. (doing nothing)
c) Working on the machine or via XWindow on another machine - it will suddenly do this "reset" thing again. (sometimes while using vi - other times using gcc to compile) - no common factor - except......
d) Whenever I "touch/use" do anything with the sound device - anywhere - it does a "reset".

It's driving me nuts - I've tried all sorts of monitoring scripts to try and catch it - but so far to no avail. Nothing in any of the logs!

Machine starts without ANY problems.

1) Any ideas? What can I look for?
2) How can I stop it from even trying to detect the sound device?
   It prints "spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7"
on the console - been doing that for a while.
3) Can I repair/upgrade the system again and will this solve the problem?
4) Do I have to do a fresh Install? Keeping in mind there's Gigabytes of data that I do cannot afford to lose!

Thanks in advance -
PS. Actually - my laptop running the same RH version - started complaining about "not detecting" the sound device about 2 weeks ago - but I ignored that!

Now for a quick shut eye - been awake all of about  30 hours!

[voidmain]

As a test can you go into your BIOS and check what interrupt your parallel port is running on? In fact turn off your parallel port and see if the problem persists? It sounds a lot like your sound card and printer are fighting for IRQ7. Whenever you do something that would try and use the sound card it will puke on an IRQ conflict.

I can understand why KDE might do this and not gnome (gnome usually isn't configured with sound support by default). And I can understand how vi or other shell commands could trigger it as the "visual bell" is configured to produce a beep through your sound card (e.g. if you press BACKSPACE when already at the left most character produces a beep).

I have never seen nor heard of this issue so I am just speculating and it's the first thing I would look at. Might want to also search RedHat's bugtrack or the kernel mailing list archives.

[caveman_piet]

Tx guys.

Checked the bios updates,conflicts,
ports, heat sensor.... you name it!!

Then after taking the box apart bit by bloody
bit, we discovered the problem....
A faulty power supply. ghnnnnGrrr!

Replaced it - and its now been up and running
without any hassles for close on four days.

Thanks again for the help.
PS. Seems the sound/printer port was the last
 straw - which pulled the power supply over
the brink!
Strange!!!!!