Jaunty 64 bit firefox locks up my machine completely

[Michael M. Moore]

On Fri, 2009-07-10 at 15:40 -0500, Sean Carolan wrote:
> 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.

Are you sure it is Firefox causing this, or has it just happened when
you've happened to have Firefox running?

What kind of hardware do you have?  Do you happen to have a VIA chipset?
Are you using CPU power management?  Which version of Ubuntu?

You didn't give anyone much information to go on.

-- 
Michael M.