Freezing on functions that run as root

["David A. Cobb" <superbiskit cox net>]

Hi,  I'm new at this from Windows ["Free, at last; Free, at last!  Thank 
..."]

Running Gnome on Debian 'sarge', kernel 2.4.26 (backport).
Fairly often, if I log in as a normal user and then try RootTerminal or 
Synaptic, that require a root password, the dialog box for the password 
gets about half painted -- just the background white and gray -- then 
everything freezes solid.  The system does not respond to mouse or 
keyboard and all I can do is hit the Reset button.  On the reboot, there 
are a bunch of bad iNodes in my /tmp filesystem. 

I've had similar things happen on just user-login, but not nearly as 
frequent.  There the solution was to boot Single and rename the user's 
".gnome*" files so they would be created fresh.  The same sort of thing 
helps in this case -- I wipe out any ".gnome*" files in /root and try 
again.  Usually it helps.  And sometimes the problem just seems to go 
away. 

Possibly a configuration glitch, but I don't have any idea where to look.
--
David A. Cobb, semi-retired [t. rex] Software Engineer