> Peter> A kernel trace in the debugger shows different things
> Peter> everytime. (ie everytime different things cause it)

> Also what I've seen.  Most, if not all, of the time, the processes
> involved with compiling the kernel aren't involved.

I'm sorry to say that this still looks like a hardware problem..
It's certainly not a problem with AMD chips in general; I have
5 systems with AMD CPUs in them, varying from a K6-2 500 (which has
been up for 416 days running 1.5.x) to a dual Athlon 1.2Ghz (which
I use as my desktop and compile machine, doing many recompiles of
kernels, and sometimes whole builds, a day).

Maybe you're being bitten by the old VIA chipset DMA bug. Try going
into the BIOS setup, and set everything to conservative values (try
"fail-safe defaults" if your BIOS has that option). Try disabling
DMA on pciide altogether. Try DIMMs of smaller memory size. See if
you can get a flash update for your motherboard's BIOS. Boot
with a minimal configuration (i.e. all PCI cards out, except
video and IDE), and see if that's stable.

- Frank