Another lock up

[Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai <asmodai@xxxxxx>]

My box at work, Compaq Evo, has locked up again.

Jun 24 based.

I was in X.  All of a sudden I lost input focus, windows of my aterms in
Window Maker changed colour when moving focus, but I couldn't type anything
in.
I noticed the disk thrashing like crazy.  Every once in a while I could
close some aterms and switch workspaces and close others.
Some dockapps were also whacked in that their static image was showing and
where normally dynamic images are were whited out.
After a while it even stopped reacting to the switching of the workspaces or
closing of the aterms.  So I pressed ctrl-alt-bs, this worked to create one
screen, no aterms, and a mouse pointer.  However, I couldn't use the mouse
pointer any more, didn't drop to console, couldn't forcefully drop to
console.  After the diskthrashing stopped I tried to go to DDB, also didn't
work.
Had to power off and on.

This box is on 256 MB and uses swap quite often.  Personally I am inclined
to say that it is triggering something in the VM system along with IO.
However, I am totally at a loss at what it could be, since I am unable to do
anything about it to gain more information.
I did enable console.log and all.log in case something MIGHT be printed on
console and thus I am able to capture it.

Ideas/hints/tips?

-- 
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(at)wxs.nl> / asmodai / kita no mono
Free Tibet! http://www.savetibet.org/ | http://www.tibet.nu/
http://www.tendra.org/   | http://diary.in-nomine.org/
When we have not what we like, we must like what we have...