Just to confirm what someone else posted, using the stock tux.org kernel has corrected our problems with mpg123, ogg123 and xmms dropping files mid-song; we can now run /multiple/ OpenOffice documents and mozilla at the same time in 256M, and the whole system just seems a lot faster.
I haven't tested exhaustively (I need to fill the flash with some images ;) but with a few images, the flash-card USB problem is also solved. All in all, it appears that for our Dell L700CXE computers, the kernel shipped with 9.0 and the #17mdk update contain VM-poison. If it helps debug this, I am appending my .config
.config
Description: working .config for Mandrake 9.0
-- Gary Lawrence Murphy - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - TeleDynamics Communications - blog: http://www.teledyn.com/mt/ - biz: http://teledyn.com/ - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (Picasso)
