Ages ago, you wrote:

 > You don't happen to be running an athlon on an asus A7V motherboard,
 > are you?  I finally seem to have stable operation with both -current
 > and a bios update I got from a funny url that I can dig up if this is
 > your problem.
 >
 > The symptoms of varying results with gzip/gunzip were a feature of
 > the ide disk drive corruption I was seeing.

please, please share the URL that you got this from if you staill have
it!  This is precisely the problem I'm seeing with my a7v+athalon and
I would be delighted if I could fix it once and for all.

thank you!
-Todd