I have upgraded to 1.4.1, and X now seems to work fine.  Thanks for your help.
 No more hangs and panics, so far.

Jim

Christos Zoulas wrote:
> 
> In article <37D4A112.DAD80C83@earthlink.net>,
> James T. Nelson <jimtnelson@earthlink.net> wrote:
> >I am running 1.4 on a Pentium 133 with 16 Meg RAM and 4G SCSI disk, and the
> >system hangs when running X.  This occurs under fvwm2, twm, and kde.  Hanging
> >usually occurs after the window manager is up and running and I run something
> >like emacs in an xterm.  Other things cause it to hang as well, such as
> >opening up the preferences window in kde.  The system hangs at various points,
> >not repeatable, though appear to be related to opening a new window.  However,
> >it hangs in every X session, unless I exit before doing any significant stuff.
> > The only way out is to reboot.
> 
> upgrade to 1.4.1... There were some serious problems with the rnd device in
> 1.4 that caused hangs (or compile a kernel without rnd).
> 
> christos