Howdy..

To be honest, I believe that this is not an LFS-specific problem. But since I don't know where else to expect knowledgeable answers and LFS is the only game I play at the moment, I'm gonna give it a try:

This has been going on for a few months now, and until recently it only occurred every two weeks or so:

While playing, my PC would simply freeze after a totally random period of time - it could be after 5 minutes of playing, or it could happen after three hours. Screen freezes, sound loops, and there's nothing I can do except hit the reset button.

Two days ago a virus forced me to format my system drive and re-install Windows.
Since then, LFS won't run longer anymore than for just a couple of laps before my PC crashes - so I guess the problem is NOT caused by any software running in the background - so far, Quicktime is all I have installed apart from the vital things like drivers, virus scanner and firewall.

My system:

Athlon XP 2600+
an old Asus A7V266-E mainboard (AGP)
1024MB RAM (PC3200 running at the mainboard's max of 2100)
Radeon 9800 Pro
a mouldy piece of audio hardware called Soundblaster Live 5.1
an unknown number of hard drives (I think two Maxtor IDE drives and an IBM SCSI drive which is probably even older than the Soundblaster)
a Yamaha CRW8824S SCSI CD-R
a NEC ND-3500AG IDE DVD-R
a D-Link network controller

I use the latest Detonator drivers and some Soundblaster drivers from 2004 which I believe are the last version they made.

Thanks for your help

on which HD it is installed? on the old or " new " ?

Ah...let me see...it's on the 30gig Maxtor drive, the older of the two "new" ones =)

whats ur cpu temp after few hours?

Nowadays people are usually having heat problems. maybe your radeon is getting a little hot? Have a look-see, why don't you?

even the RAM can be damaged. try running memory test prog too.

I've never had any heat-related problems and neither my cpu nor my graphics card is overclocked, so I guess this is not the problem...I'll check the memory, though.

As others have suggested, more than likely a heat issue.

Sound looping could also indicate a dodgy (or dodgy drivers) soundcard. See if you can get newer drivers for it, or.. turn down the hardware acceleration a notch or two and see if that helps?

Doesn't seem to be the RAM...
I suspect it's something with the soundcard - it behaves strange at times anyway. It's set to 5.1 speakers but won't play anything on the rear speakers unless you reset the speaker settings after each start of Windows. And it sometimes adds delay where there shouldn't be any.
I must admit though that I'm reluctant to test if LFS will run stable without sound...

Just for your information:
So far, it seems to have been the soundcard. Or rather the drivers.