Comment 54 for bug 479296

I can reproduce the freezes on either of 2 PCs, both P4 era boxes with built in NIC/video/sound.
reproduce as follows :
Install 9.10 fresh + 159 updates + configure firefox + install thunderbird and configure that too.
Start GUI as normal, use 2 consoles (Ctrl-Alt F4 & F5) to watch the tail of xsession-errors and syslog.
Yes, syslog has many ratelimit messages and I do think they're irrelevant.

The last gasp coming out in xsession-errors at freeze time says :
** Message: NM disappeared

** (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:1423): WARNING **: no sender

the NM message seems to be right at crash time.

What I see at freeze/crash time is that the mouse still moves, but mouse clicks and keyboard activity is ignored.
After the freeze - when I plug in a USB flash drive the hard drive rattles, something is doing an fsck (or similar) so the whole OS is not dead, my guess is that its only the GUI that is stuck.