total system lockup - printer related?

[Jamie LaRue]

I have an iMac, with a 3 gig partition for YDL, and 160 megs of memory.
My system started crawling last week, after working reliably and swiftly
for about 3 weeks. Some programs would start to load, then just quit. So
I made a backup of my home data, then played with some other
distributions. NONE of them worked, and I got a host of bizarre video
problems, keyboard failures, and such.

Finally, it seemed that I had rendered the whole computer unusable. On
sort of a last lark, I popped the Apple OS 9 CD in, and it came up. I
repartitioned the drive and installed OS 9 again. Stable as a rock.

So I repartitioned it again, and tried to load YDL. Things seemed to be
working until I installed a printer (USB connection to an hp laserjet
1200). Then, whenever I tried to print, the whole system would lock. No
mouse movement, no keyboard action, nada. I could reboot, and Linux
appeared to fix the file system. But again when I printed, blooey!

The only other thing I can think of is that I did download and install
Open Office before all of these things started to go crazy. But it
worked fine for about a week.

As I type this, I've reinitialized the drive yet again, although this
time, the Mac seemed most sluggish about even using the CD-ROM drive.
I'm going to see how it likes OS X. It all sort of adds up to some kind
of hardware or firmware issue, maybe. But for now, YDL just isn't
useable for me. Anybody have any other bright ideas?

-- 
James LaRue * jlarue@jlarue.com * http://www.dpld.org
Voice: (720) 733-8624 * FAX: (720) 733-9622 fax
----
"There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money,
either."  - Robert Graves