processing, my GUI goes berserk. For instance, pressing a key once will cause it to be input several dozens of times, the mouse click events occur randomly even if I don't click the mouse, and so on. Is this a known problem? Did I happen to install a bad version or something?
As far as I know this it not a known issue. It rather sounds like something else but Gnome is causing this. Does it also happen for other desktop environments or on your system console? For instance, when I use my scanner which is conected to a crappy ISA SCSI adapter my desktop becomes extremely unresponsive. But this is not Gnome's fault.
gnome: 2.8.0 R3
You may want to upgrade to Gnome 2.12 :) -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/