[Sussex] Curious problem - sound related ???

[John D.]

Hi list,

After some recent system related traumas (due to my meddling with KDE 
3.5.2/updates for it/newest nvidia driver), I'm back at the basic mandriva 
2006 version with KDE 3.4.2

It's giving me a problem that starts with audio and progresses to the whole 
GUI.

When I was listening to an Audio CD with Kscd earlier it started to "skip", so 
I tried to eject the disc (via the graphic interface). I noted that if the CD 
was skipping, the mouse/cursor was unresponsive, the skipping became a 
complete loss of sound and the GUI was frozen completely.

The "knee jerk" of ctrl+alt+backspace didn't work either - well it did, 3 or 4 
minutes later, the disc ejected and system restarted the X server.

Ok, so I initially thought of knackered CD, but after checking discounted that 
and decided to rip the disc with Sound Juicer (into FLAC format, as with my 
other music stuff). This was uneventful.

I then started playing some music, but with Amorak. The first track or two 
played OK, then the skipping started, with the same initial GUI freezing 
symptom leading to the loss of sound/complete GUI freeze.

I ended up just switching off the speakers and leaving it to see if it would 
unfreeze itself.

An hour or two later, I checked back to find that Amorak had crashed without 
giving an error and the GUI was working fine.

So, my question is, what or where do I need to start looking at first? Having 
never experienced symptoms like this before.

I did look through various logs but nothing really showed up that I could 
follow enough to try to work out what might be going on - and I couldn't find 
anything online that might give me any suggestions as to where or what I 
might need to look at.

Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated as the current 
configuration has not caused any problems like this before (or other probs 
for that matter).

regards

John D.