System: Asrock K7S8X motherboard
AMD Athlon XP2600 processor
Matrox Mystique graphics card
256MB RAM
Maxtor Hard Drive
Samsung CDRW / DVD
On board sound / LAN
Microsoft PS/2 wheel mouse
Generic IEEE 1394 Firewire card.

Knoppix v3.9 boots fine to the desktop, but crashes very soon after - when I try to do anything ( eg
load mozilla / gimp / emacs). The mouse pointer / screen freezes and Ctrl-Alt-Esc , Ctrl-Alt-F1 ... Ctrl-AltF12, Ctrl-Alt-Del all have no effect, and I have to hit the reset button.

I have tried a some cheat codes at random ( including failsafe) - but without any success.
I have had similar results using v3.7 and v3.8 as well ( I have checked the MD5 checksum, and burnt the images
on the slowest setting available).

I'm not sure how to debug this,and would be grateful for any suggestions. Thanks.