I was unable to resist the lure of the bleeding edge and replaced my
old RH 6.2 install with Mandrake 8.1.

By and large the results seem good.  The installation went very
smoothly.

BUT....

Now, occasionally when I use peripherals, like downloading pictures
from the digital camera through a serial port, or printing, some
driver or something starts sending beeps through the on-board
speaker.  Nothing comes out through the soundcard to the external
speakers, but a periodic beeping starts, which eventually changes into
a constant whine and then I have to reboot!

Nothing is logged into any of the logfiles I can find.

I'm about yay close to giving up and replacing with RedHat 7.1 (don't
want to learn any new methods for init, now that I figured out the RH
style), but thought I'd ask for suggestions first....

Thanks,
R