Jaunty 64 bit firefox locks up my machine completely

[Sean Carolan]

Ok, so the first time this happened I hoped it was a one-time
occurrence but it's occurred three times now.  I'll visit a website,
usually with some kind of flash widget on it and the entire operating
system freezes.  The last two times this has occured were when I
visited www.ingdirect.com and www.discovery.com.  When the crash
occurs it's not just Firefox, and not only X windows but the kernel
locks up completely.  I can't get console, can't log in remotely,
can't do anything except hit the power switch and reboot.  This is a
huge problem, since I generally have at least a dozen windows open at
a time, with various terminals, RDP, vmware, etc.  It takes me 10-15
minutes just to get back to where I was before the crash.

Has anyone else experienced something like this?  Any suggestions on
how I can keep Firefox from bringing down my entire machine?  I had
hoped Ubuntu would be more stable than Windows as my primary desktop
OS, but so far it's not proving to be the case.  At least in Vista
when a program crashes it doesn't bring down the entire machine.
Unfortunately there's no error report or stack trace because the
machine instantly halts before any of that can be generated.

If you have any pointers or suggestions I'd love to hear them.