a7a266 lockups on xwindows startup

nobody will EVER figure this out
i think

this happens to me on every linux distro i have used thus far
i have an a7a266 board with a ali chipset, i am currently using a geforce 2 mx but this problem has happened with a voodoo 4500, a tnt2, and a tnt in the system.

when the system is first powered on, it will boot up normally, and then when x windows is launched, the system will appear to crash and lock up . blank screen, no keyboard or mouse working, cant ctrl-alt-delete. HOWEVER, you can go and ssh into the machine, and the SECOND that you ssh in, as soon as it displays the login prompt, bang, its unlocked, finishes loading xwindows no problem.
after the machine has done this say once or twice, it will be fine until you power it off again, tho it has randomly done it during one or two reboots even after being powered on for awhile.
i have taken out every card in the system, in the past, except video card, then switched through several video cards, hard drives, disconnected floppy drives, switched DIMMs, tried different kernels, i have turned off EVERY POSSIBLE kernel command line option like nousb, nodma, etc, turned on and off and changed the value of literally every single option in my BIOS, upgraded my system bios, compiled custome kernels, used different video drivers in X (fbdev, nv, vesa, nvidia, to name a few) and ...
one day i took out my gold-lead DIMM which was in a tin-lead socket, and i cleaned the contacts off with a pencil eraser, and it stopped doing it.
now i just added another 256mb of memory, and though it hasnt done this for literally a year or more, now it's doing it again.
grr?
this happens, as i said, in slackware, knoppix, redhat, mandrake, dosen't matter what distro, or what version of the kernel i use. if i boot up my system and let it sit there for like an hour before trying to launch X, X will run. (?!?!?!)

i guess i will clean the contacts on my new DIMM which for whatever reason i haven't tried yet... but so far i have no clue at all what is causing this. something to do with memory timing???

You have a problem with irq sharing.
Solution should be found in combining the right bios settings with the right cheat codes of knoppix
Try this one :
in bios :
-reserve irq for agp slot (if your vga card is agp)
-disable option 'pnp os'
-enable acpi power management
-enable system memory
-enable video memory

Try booting knoppix first with these options.
If it won't boot in xwindow, disable acpi option in bios and boot knoppix with cheatcode 'knoppix noacpi' .

If still no solution you gotta explore even more you bios settings and cheatcode settings of knoppix.
Usually till now there ins't a single pc I didn't manage to start in x-window with knoppix. (not even the old ones). I must have already started about 30 different pc's with knoppix (laptops and desktops).
In many cases changes in the bios were nesescary.

one advice : don't give up ! victory will even taste sweeter :wink:

greetzzzzz,