Lock up on Fedora 14

[Dinesh Sharma]

I have a strange problem with my Fedora-14 system. If I play an avi file, the keyboard locks up and mouse clicks are ignored. This also happens once in a while during web browsing.
As a result, I can't do anything with the computer till I do a hard reboot. The strange thing is that in the locked up state the mouse pointer moves -- so the system is not dead!

My hardware is pretty standard with an Intel mother board and USB keyboard/mouse. I can dig out the mother board number if required. The Fedora 14 set up was updated till the updates stopped. Moving to a Gnome 3 based distribution is not an option, even with this annoyance in Fedora 14!

Dinesh Sharma

[bendib]

Dinesh: Firstly, ctrl + alt + f3 should get you to a text prompt, at which point you can type killall Xorg to restart your login screen, and secondly, try XFCE. It can easily be made to look and act very much like GNOME 2. That's what I did. I am on Fedora 17.

[Dinesh Sharma]

Thanks for your suggestions.
Actually, as I said in my original post, the keyboard is completely locked out. So Ctrl-Alt-F3 gets nowhere.
Re Gnome 2:
When I do finally give in, I shall probably go with xfce. Till then, may be I shall live with the headache. Inability to watch video material is an annoyance, but not an overpowering one. I have a dual boot system after all -- so a sheepish boot into Windows and a browse through the recordings of last week's lectures there is always possible.

[bendib]

Dinesh: You of course have a right to your opinion, but also, I attached a screenshot of my desktop as it is as I view this thread. :^)