Debugging stability

Hi all, in the recent weeks I am experiencing serious stability issues on two of my machines running KDE 3. I know KDE 3 is not Trinity and whatever the causes are they might be fixed in Trinity, but nevertheless I believe that the debugging techniques are identical for KDE and Trinity. That's why I'm asking for help here. Machine 1 On first of my machines I am experiencing random desktop freezes around two times a day (this started around 2 weeks ago). When this happens the current application becomes irresponsive and I am unable to switch to different application by using Alt-tab or by clicking on the task bar. I am able to kill the graphical environment using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace or go to text console (Ctrl-Alt-F1) to kill tasks. I was unable to find any program that, when killed, would unfreeze the desktop. The only puzzling thing is that killing Firefox seems to make it a zombie process. Machine 2 That machine experiences random problems when loading the desktop after login. The problem manifests itself with an error message from KDE panel saying that "'/home/USER/.local/share/applications/foo.desktop' service is broken" (where foo is an application like Skype, Firefox, etc.) and then the KDE panel becomes irresponsive. Again, this is random and sometimes the desktop loads correctly. In both cases I have no idea how to debug the encountered problems. Are there any logs that could point me the source of the problems? Are there any diagnostics that I could run? Any ideas appreciated as I fell clueless. Janek --- Politechnika Łódzka Lodz University of Technology Treść tej wiadomości zawiera informacje przeznaczone tylko dla adresata. Jeżeli nie jesteście Państwo jej adresatem, bądź otrzymaliście ją przez pomyłkę prosimy o powiadomienie o tym nadawcy oraz trwałe jej usunięcie. This email contains information intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient or if you have received this message in error, please notify the sender and delete it from your system.