Bill,
I have an intermittent (but persistent) problem with a lockup on Win95 in a MIDI app; that can take seconds or hours to show up, but, the VM seems to keep running, the Morphic UI freezes. I'm slowly shifting hardware around in hopes of trying the same thing on another computer and OS without "destroying" the machine with the reproduceable problem.
The short version is that I'm very interested in seeing how one debugs such things in Squeak.
It is very hard to do this. Partly because you need low-level VM tools to look into some of these issues. In particular if they only happen on some machines it means that some assertion of the VM about its hosting platform is wrong. And that means you need to go into it very low-level. There are some features that might help (I added for instance the ability to list all socket state in order to find some of the socket related problems) but this doesn't replace a debugger. Since all of the VM maintainers test quite heavily across all (available) flavours of OSes it also means that the code "ought to work" as it is.
To date, I've gotten crash dumps
from it by enabling 3D hardware acceleration on a particular
machine;
That machine wouldn't use a graphics card which is based on a RIVA TNT chip on Win98, would it?! I just got a totally weird crash report from such a configuration but since I don't have access to it it's almost impossible to do remote debugging.
Cheers, - Andreas