>I am experiencing crashes on a MacII 8MB ram 40MB swap running a
>kernel built from sources from around november 6. When I put a load on
>the machine (ie. compiling) the machine has a tendancy to just lock up
>and stop responding. I end up doing a cold reboot and when I check the
>log files I don't see any errors. Any ideas?

I had a similar problem with the system hanging.  I only had 16 Mb of swap, 
so I suspected that I was running out of memory.  To test this, I wrote a 
program to allocate memory using sbrk() in a loop, until I ran out.  If I 
allocated 1 Mb at a time, the system would handle it properly, but if I 
allocated 1 kb at a time, the, system would lock up.  I don't know if this
would happen to you, since you seem to have plenty of swap space.

Rick