System freeze

I am running suse 9.2, KDE 3.4.2 and kernel 2.6.8-24, and have been having an annoying problem that seems to be getting worse. Whenever I play either a mp3 or listen to streaming music from the net, the system will freeze completely--not even able to switch to terminal & I end up having to reboot. Now it is happening if I play mpegs as well. No luck with Google and not sure how to proceed in debugging this issue.  I am beginning to wonder if it is a hardware problem or IRQ issue, because a while ago I gave 9.3 a try, and it would still freeze when playing mp3 or streaming music. Pretty clueless. Any advice or pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Chip