CentOS 5 :: Stalling, Freezing And Just Plain Locking Up With 5.4 And Gnome?

I've been having problems for a while with my pc at work and after a bout with a similar desktop I figured out that it somehow relates to the kernel updates from 5.3 to 5.4. I have two machines with identical motherboards (Asus M3a32-mvp), cpu ( athlon 64 X2 6400) and memory (8 gigs Corsair) with different video cards.

My desktop at work started with Centos 5.2 and was kept updated to 5.4 along the way. The other PC is my desktop at home and it started out at 5.3 and stayed there until recently mainly because my wife mostly uses it so I just never got around to doing updates.

Here is the problem, a while back the work PC started doing weird things, it would stutter, freeze up, sometime the mouse cursor would freeze into a cross hair and sometimes completely lock me out where even the keyboard wouldn't work so I had to kill power to reboot anf get control back. I eventually discovered that if I still had keyboard access I could jump to a console window, log in and killall nautilus or killall gnome-panel and I might get things back to normal for a while. I can even log in with another machine to use the killall commands if the keyboard locks up. I checked TOP during these episodes to see what was killing the system, I figured something was running a muck and gobbling up processing time or memory but nothing shows that appears to be off.

Like I said the home system was on 5.3 and not showing the stuttering problems so I even considered that the video card drivers might be causing something, that is until I tried to update the home system and got the same issues.

I had a hard drive failing at home so I figured I'd back up the data and reinstall the main system on a new one so I could start over with a clean system. This time I started from 5.4. Almost imediately I discovered the freezing problems after the complete install so after trying a few things I wiped and reloaded, couldn't mess around too long with it as the wife was really complaining about not having a PC, a 5.3 version. Bingo, now the system functions perfectly, no stuttering or freezing up. I then used yum updates to updates everything but the kernel. This also seemed to give me a system without freezes so I stopped there with the home machine.

Just to be clear the home pc used the standard yum repositories defaulted in the setup i didn't add any so it isn't a 3rd party repo causing the problems with the home machine. So it looks like the updates from 5.3 to 5.4 regarding the kernel seem to be causing me problems.

It's getting so bad at work I'm planning on wiping and reloading a 5.3 version and going from there but that's alot of work so I'd really like to just fix what is going on with the 5.4 version.