yes, it's a home system, not production. and yes, i finally applied the kernel patch because without that this thread wasn't going anywhere. the patch didn't break anything, but neither did it solve my problem. here's the current output of "dmesg|grep XFS" : SGI XFS with ACLs, security attributes, realtime, large block numbers, no debug enabled SGI XFS Quota Management subsystem XFS mounting filesystem hdb6 Starting XFS recovery on filesystem: hdb6 (dev: hdb6) Ending XFS recovery on filesystem: hdb6 (dev: hdb6) XFS mounting filesystem hdb7 Ending clean XFS mount for filesystem: hdb7 now that the patch issue is out of the way, does anyone have any idea what may be wrong with my system? as an aside, let me add that i *do* trust SuSE to do their best for customers, but to err is human. one of their kernel patches in 9.2 broke the system badly, and it was updated in a hurry; i'm sure everyone on this list remembers that. i was one of the sufferers, and i had to restore the original kernel in rescue-boot mode. i wished i had waited to let the patch sink in for a few days before applying it. i'm ignorant about production systems and their management policies; this was just a home user's twopence, for what it's worth. thanks. - t. -- cogito, ergo es.