Blocking Browser

It can sometimes take months on a new machine before you run into a problem you've not seen before, partially because one doesn't always test out each and every individual component of the system.

In addition, I am running Fedora Core 4, and constantly updating the system. So that doesn't help pin pointing when the problem started....

Symptoms/observations:

  1. websites like slashdot, newsforge, cnn, intellicast would just hang my browser. I would have to kill it to get back to browsing.
  2. simple websites work fine. after some experimenting it turned out the existence of a flashplayer plugin would hang the browser.
  3. this URL: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/geospy/ turned out to be a good test URL to hang my browser.
  4. removed the flashplayer (of course) solved the problem
  5. updating to a slightly newer version (flashplayer 7) did not solve the problem
  6. xmms would also hang at this time -> soundcard problems?
  7. gaim would also show many many spawned/cloned instances. also, gaim would not reliably beep me anymore, which it normally does. More indications it was the soundcard.
  8. i would also use skype, which may lock the soundcard in odd ways. Also i had noticed that the microphhone would not work after a suspend, but this time i was working on a rebooted system, so recording worked.
This page was last modified on 20-Nov-2005 by teuben@astro.umd.edu.