Spurious freezes and file system corruption

["Joachim Frieben" <jfrieben freesurf fr>]

For "FC6" and current "rawhide", I have observed recurrent freezes of
my "IBM ThinkPad T23" which seem to be related to file system access, in
particular when installing "RPM" packages. To rule out interference with
the "X" environment and system services, I have checked that this already
happens in single user mode by executing "rpm -i [rpm1 ...]". The system
freezes during the package install which sometimes implies corruption of
the installed package (fixable be reinstalling the package), but once even
caused unrecoverable corruption of the "__db*" files.
In the first time, I was thinking of some hardware failure (hard disk,
chipset, etc.) but a drive diagnosis run has completed without complaint,
and after installing "FC5" from scratch nothing of this kind ever happens.
It is noteworthy, that for "FC6" and current "rawhide" the network install
completes without the least hick-up which implies huge amounts of data
being transferred over the network and written to the disk. The trouble
only begins afterwards.
Has anybody else encountered this issue?