gcc seems to hang while compiling

I am developing software in c++ using gcc 3.4.2 under Fedora
Core 3 on
an Intel Celeron 2.66 GHz with 256M of RAM.  I regularly
recompile the
code on which I'm working.  Every so often (maybe once a
week) the
computer hangs up while compiling for five or ten minutes. 
Eventually,
all my processes get killed, the x session seems to restart
and the
computer 'resumes' as if I had just logged in.  I can
reproduce this
kind of behavior by running an infinitely recursing shell
script.  I
can't predict when this will happen, because most of the
time the
compilation works just fine, it 'crashes' compiling the
same code under
the same circumstances.  Compiling again after the crash
works.

I'd hoped that I had a corrupted version of the compiler,
so I finally
made some time today to build a new one.  I downloaded gcc
3.4.5 and
built it. I tried running the tests and saw a similar
'crash' when it
got to the c-torture test: the machine seemed to freeze for
ten
minutes, all windows eventually closed, and finally the x
session
seemed to reset, but it didn't fully come up afterwards,
because the
machine still would not respond to any clicks (it did show
me "help
tags" when I would float the cursor over various
icons, though) or
keypresses (e.g. ctrl-alt-fN).  Eventually, the mouse cursor
disappeared altogether and I had to reboot.

Our VP wants me to reformat the machine and re-install, but
it seems to
me like a long time to spend on a solution I don't know
will work or
when there might be a much simpler solution.  Any ideas what
might be
causing this?  Could it be a hardware problem?


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