screensaver freezes system totally

[NoOp]

On 07/10/2010 02:45 AM, pete wrote:
...
> Hi,
> 
> This problem has reared it head again, his machine only had 'wobbly 
> windows' activated. good news this time i was there to check the logs!
> 
> the system log said it was running 'cron' as root then it stated that 
> 'no one cares, try booting without irq module' prior to freeze up.
> 
> All of which means nothing except that we do care! a brief bit of 
> googleing only digs up posts from 2001 / 2002 and are far to technical 
> for me to follow!
> 
> so my question is this why has this old (?) problem resurfaced now and 
> only on his machine, would following such an outdated solution work on 
> newer versions?

Nowhere do to state _which_ screensaver is being used. Some screensavers
are/were IMO junk and/or were simply too gpu intensive for some
hardware. In order to troubleshoot just use the default where the screen
blanks; that will tell if it's an actual screensaver application, or if
it's the screensaver routine itself. If that causes no problems go to
the screensaver he was using and test. In each case keep track of
_which_ screensaver option was being used.
  There are many screensavers... some work on some hardware, some don't.
Simply stating that the screensaver is freezing the system does no good
without supplying details.

Also, you'll need to tell us which nvidia card and driver he is using.
Provide the VGA section from:

$ sudo lspci -v

Example output:
VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV25GL [Quadro4 900 XGL]
(rev a3)
	Subsystem: nVidia Corporation Device 0138
	Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 248, IRQ 16
	Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
	Memory at e8000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
	Memory at f4780000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=512K]
	[virtual] Expansion ROM at fe9e0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
	Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
	Capabilities: [44] AGP version 2.0
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia
	Kernel modules: nvidia-96, nvidiafb, rivafb, nouveau