I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my stationary machine in an attempt to get it into a more working state, and I was very unhappy with the 7.10 version. The system kept freezing completely and not even the system recall key combos worked. After experimenting a bit I noticed that it happened whenever the machine was accessing the network, but it didn’t have to be a high network load. Apparently the default kernel (x86/x86_64) has a problem with my system (athlon xp 2500+ with a broadcom ethernet adapter).The solution was to upgrade to the i386 ubuntu kernel doesn’t suffer from the same problems.