Knoppix hangs always

I don't know where the problem is. I am quite new to knoppix but i managed to configure the internet-because i had some problems with that, so i'm starting to get a little grip on it.
My biggest problem now is that knoppix always hangs and i don't even know where to start from to troubleshoot this problem.
I have an AMD 3200+ with 1Gb ram all the devices and controllers seem to be configured correctly. I used a SWAP file configuration and also did a persistent knoppix image on USB pendrive.
These didn't help solving the problem.
My harddisks are not always available to write on and sometimes i also find icons for nonexistent drives!
I'm not very much concerned about the drives for now because at least sometimes they work, but i recon that it's probably that which is making my knoppix hang. Btw on windows xp i don't have any of these clashes -just to be clear that the PC works fine.
I am trying to install firefox now because i couldn't get flash playback on konqueror after installing flash player 9.
If anyone can help me with any of these it would be very much appreciated.
thanks

As Harry Kuhman always says, check the integrity of the cd or dvd that you're running knoppix from. Maybe you got a bad burn.

If you are using the Knoppix 5.1.1 live CD, type in the following at the Knoppix boot screen "knoppix acpi=off " (without the quotation marks) and see if this will get the Knoppix operating system to work for you.

Mine used to hang, also, until I used that particular command at the boot up screen. Now it loads ok.

US