I have struggled with this one and can't find anything obvious situation: KG7, 256Mb DDR, XP1700, Nvidia, Soundblaster 5.1 (plus ususal other stuff) SuSE 8.0 It's a box with heavy childern usage and survives very well unsupervised (hats off to all involved in Linux/SuSE) On two "undocumented" occasions (spanning months) the system has refused to reboot and the start-up has halted at trying to load the soundcard drivers. Following another amateur attempt to use rescue (can someone point me to somewhere helpful) I noticed during fiddling with install the shutdown stuck on shutting down the sound drivers co-incidence? Have I just ben unlucky testing the journaling system, does it sound like a dodgy [e.g., interrrupt on the] soundcard? Any thoughts gratefully received Gerry Gavigan