mint 17 64-bit KDE hard locking

[seasoned_geek]

I won't say crash because I do not believe all of it goes down. At first I thought this was the screen saver/locker. I tried every combination of settings, but after a few hours of just running BOINC in the evening I would come out to a hard locked machine. Eventually I found a set of settings which would leave the machine only partially locked. By that I mean I could wiggle the mouse and the screen would come up, but nothing would work and the keyboard was non-functional. Mouse would move on the screen but even the start button would not bring up a menu. Lately, it seems to crash/hard lock when using Mozilla to browse.

This is not a hardware issue. I can boot my Mint 14 KDE 32-bit partition on this same machine and leave it up for days doing development, surfing. The only thing it is not doing is running BOINC, which the Mint 17 partition does in the evenings. I have two other machines running Mint 17 Cinamin and Mate. One 64-bit, one 32-bit. I don't do much surfing on them, all they do is run BOINC. I keep current with updates on all machines (except the Mint 14 partition on this one obviously).

Now it appears to be something wrong with the network drivers/management in Mint 17 KDE 64-bit. Judging from what I see in the BOINC application and what has been happening to me while using the machine, it has something to do with network/Internet usage. BOINC seems to be in the middle of updating projects when it crashes in the evening. Over the past 2 days Mint 17 KDE has hard locked just surfing ebay or my blog.

Once again, Min 14 KDE 32-bit runs flawlessly on this machine for days on end.

Has anybody else been experiencing this?

[seasoned_geek]

This probably impacts all Linux flavors, not just KDE under Mint. I had an ASUS video card with an Nvidia chipset. The default driver loaded during install was xserver-xorg-video-nauveau (sp?). On a whim I installed the proprietary nvidia-331 driver. End of problems. That driver appears to do something horribly wrong with screen saver logic. I have since swapped the video card in this machine for one with 300+ cuda so I could participate in some higher end BOINC projects. If the main support developer is in America and wishes to get the video card from me I can ship it to them.