X11 stability

[S Yuval]

Ever since I installed Debian, I have to hard boot at least 3 times a day, because X windows crashes and hangs the machine. This usually happens when the system is busy installing programs, or doing some other resource consuming job in one of the virtual consoles (X itself included), and I choose to flip between consoles. However, when I used Red Hat 7.1 and even Red Hat 8.0, I could always use Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get out to a console and kill the X process, however, now even this is impossible. May I note that I have experienced this problem both when using an old 2.4.2 Red Hat kernel and when using the newer 2.4.18 kernel supplied with Debian.     Another issue is KDE, which locks the system upon startup unless I switch to terminal mode, let it finish loading, and only then switch back to X. The official complaint is that my sound card could not be found. Can this be avoided?     Also, I noticed that when the computer is idle, X shuts down automatically after some period of time. How can I cancel this option?