3.8.x toram causes crash when utilising swap space

This problem came up in 3.8 CeBit and again in 3.8.1

My machine is a P4 2.66b/1GB DDR/2GB swap partition on the hdd

I run knoppix with the command "knoppix toram" so it copies the iso to a ramdisk
It then boots into kde fine
I then load up the ram by opening a stack of apps
Then kde seems to crash - I have a konsole term open running top, and top stays active, but the sometimes the entire interface won't respond to any mouse clicks/sometimes it's just the taskbar down the bottom

I'm familiar withe the behaviour of Morphix 0.4.1 running off a ramdisk ie it hits the ram limit then the machine grinds to a halt while it swaps ~300MB out to the hard disk. ~30secs later it's back up and running

In the case of Knoppix, it seems to hit the ram limit, and somehow seems to transfer 300MB of data to the HDD with 2-3secs of disk access... I expect this is when it crashes, and I can't open any more apps.

Now the morphix implementation is not graceful, but it is very reliable - I was hoping that the latest releases of knoppix would make the changeover more transparent, but it just doesn't seem to work at all :(

I'm having trouble accessing the bugs site at the moment, so I'm just posting here to see if anyone has any similar experiences and any possible solutions.

I'm no stranger to remastering, and am not afraid to get in and do a bit of screwing about to try and resolve this, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel - particularly if I'm going to spend a few days learning about what's going on before I find it's something really simple :P

So anyone got any ideas?