gnome freezing on dapper and edgy live cd

[Jason Fayre]

Hello everyone,
I am new to this list.  I have been playing with Ubuntu for a few weeks 
now.  I am quite experienced with Linux, but I have mainly used Redhat 
in the past.
I am having a problem running X-windows.  This happens both on installed 
systems and on the live cd.
My system is a amd athlon64 3000.  I am using an ASUS a8n-vm CSM 
motherboard.  This board has onboard sound and video.  The chipset is 
Nvidia Nforce4.
Periodically, while using gnome, the system will just freeze.  I cannot 
switch to another console when this happens.  The system is completely 
frozen.  I have not seen any log messages when this occures.
I have seen this happen after X comes up on the live CD.  The ubuntu 
startup sound will start to play and then will just get stuck in a loop. 
  The sound stays on, but the system is frozen.

It is worth mentioning that I am totally blind, so I am not able to tell 
what is happening on the screen.  I do know that the system is frozen 
because I am unable to switch consoles.

I am not sure if this is related, but I have also seen some interesting 
issues with sound while using synthetic speech.  While using Orca, which 
is the gnome screen reader, the speech seems to studder and is fairly 
choppy.  It does not matter which synthesizer I use.  I have tried both 
Festival and the Software DECtalk.

I have also tried this with two different sound cards, the on-board one 
and an Audigy.  I have also tried both the standard Vesa video driver as 
well as the Nvidia drivers.  Same result.


This is only happening on my home system.  i have a system at work that 
runs on an Intel CPU with an Intel chipset and everything works fine.
Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

-- Jason