I guess there are several different issues, casually showing the similar end effect "desktop frozen". After figuring out the cause, we should open a different bug report. In anyway, can anyone test whether the issue is related with the (i915) graphics driver? Have anyone checked with nomodeset boot option? Or maybe better with i915.modeset=0 option? And, as requested in comment 8, please give the outputs of hwinfo on the affected machines, taken from the working kernel. Also the dmesg outputs from the working kernel would be helpful, too. After getting the information of the working state, let's try to get the logs from the broken state.