Hello,

> This is on dual Pentium 3 machine
> Kernel was compiled with '-O3 -march=pentium3 -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse'

You cannot use FP/MMX/SSE in kernel AFAIK. Given that the kernel
does no FP calculations by itself, '-mfpmath' should not matter,
'-mmmx -msse' however could be dangerous. 

	-- Jachym