UPDATE: I HATE my computer!!!

["Christopher Henderson" <christopher acme-tech org>]

Alright - I found out what the problem was.  FYI my system is a dual-athlon
machine with 512 megs of DDR RAM and SCSI HDs.  Under RH 8 I was experience
stability issues but *not* under Windows XP.  So I saw that the DP 2 of
FreeBSD 5 was released, downloaded it, installed it and stability there was
also fine - even after recompiling the kernel for SMP support.  Previously
under FreeBSD 4.x the same sort of problems that plagued me under RH 8
showed up.  I thought that was curious and tried installing the previous
release of Red Hat (7.3) and it too was also highly stable.  I then saw what
was different - my Firewire card wasn't detected/supported in Red Hat 7.3
but was in 8.0 and when I commented out that device module my system under
Red Hat 8 has been stable ever sense - so it was Firewire.  Wacky - am I the
only person to have stability problems concerning Firewire hardware?

Thnx everyone for your patience with my rant and your help!

~Christopher