I wrote: |> Until recently I had just 32MB of RAM. I added 64 more on |> Saturday. Everything seemed fine to begin with---the 96MB was |> detected in BIOS and by the kernel; I had much less disk-thrashing |> in long Netscape sessions and so on. But .... |> |> If I leave the machine up overnight when I log on again in the |> morning, I get constant segmentation faults (especially in |> resource-heavy applications like emacs, TeX, X ...) and sometimes |> a kernel-panic. Rebooting `fixes' the problem.
I'm responding to my own message in case the information might be useful to others who could face similar problems. The difficulties were caused, as a number of people suggested, by a corrupt memory module. The memory problem was not detected in BIOS nor by the memtest program that is in the package `sysutils' (it reported `no errors'). However, massive problems were detected and reported by the memtest-86 program which is part of the hwtools package. I highly recommend this program. You copy it to a floppy and boot from that floppy. It then does a (very!) lengthy and detailed check of every nook and cranny of your memory modules. No home should be without one, Jim