Mate freezes - maybe related to psmouse or smartscroll

[Emerson Prado]

I'm using LMDE, following the 'latest' flavour, with Mate and still using gdm3 (didn't migrate do mdm yet). Sometimes, my computer freezes for some minutes, usually during or after a CPU intensive task.
Today it froze, and I got this from tail /var/log/messages:
Jun 30 13:40:54 <host> kernel: [ 7300.546457] psmouse serio1: bad data from KBC - timeout
(Previous lines were only related to boot)
I'm judging that Mate froze, and not anything else, because this started happening after I migrated to Mate (from Gnome sHell). But I'm far from expert, and this judgement can be plain wrong.
I saw a probably related but here: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=71950
I can't tell if this happens during mouse action. The /var/log/messages line was my only clue pointing to the mouse.
Did anyone see anything similar? What can be happening? Should I switch to mdm?
Many thanks,
Emerson

[Emerson Prado]

One funny thing: despite the error message points to psmouse, the mouse is the only thing that actually works during these hangups. This is reproduced every time.
Best regards,
Emerson