Serious crashes (black screen -> kernel panic) on Mint12

[ukirik]

I have been starting to experience more and more problems with my Mint 12 installation. First it was the memory leak in Gnome3, I switched to Cinnamon it got better but not solved. Then the memory problem got worse (more than 1GB over a weeks use, especially when the screen is locked over a weekend). Thankfully I have enough memory to continue working, and I commonly execute the Alt+F2 + r. Annoying, but still very manageable.

Every once in a while I get stuck with an occasional GUI freeze, non-responsive to Alt+F2, but restarting Xserver works fine there...

Lately though I have been having more serious problems. Sometimes the whole thing goes down in flames: X failure, drops down to terminal (black screen) with lots of info on tainted processes... That stage is completely non-responsive to any keyboard signals, even caps lock is not recognized. Pressing the power button once or twice, prints out a bunch of more information which then ultimately leads to a kernel panic, with only remedy being a hard restart (holding the power button until the system powers down).

The only common thing I could trace so far is when I click on a link from an application (e.g. Thunderbird) and open a tab in Chrome. Now it's not reproducible in the sense that I open maybe 50 links a day, and 51 the next day could sink the system. Or maybe two weeks from the last. I found no patterns so far... I have lots of resources in the RAM/CPU front so I cant imagine it having to do with something like that.

Any help would be appreciated as this is pretty annoying.