[benou]

I had the same issue with mine.

The easiest way to freeze the system is to run 'dd' or 'badblocks' on the disks. I always won when doing that.

I tried many things trying to correct this, here's a very very short summary :
- the RAM has been tested with memtest, no defects found
- Bios upgraded to the latest version available from Jetway
- disable every on-board devices, except IDE disk (I also tried with SATA only)
- test with several disks (which work fine on another computer)
- test with another IDE cable
- test with and without DMA, at various DMA speed
- test underclocking the proc to 400MHz
- test with various OS : windows 2000, windows xp (SP1 and SP2), Linux Debian testing, Linux Gentoo, each with various kernel versions, including latest vanilla
I've read a lot of mailing lists, and also viaarena.com, but I didn't found what could be the problem.
Under Windows, it just doesn't work : it was very hard to install (many freeze during installs) and completely unsusable then (It was impossible to watch a DivX or wathever).
Under Linux, even with the more conservative tunings (kernel compiled with full debugging support - including kexec/kdump -, IRQ debugging, etc.), it keeps freezing, and sometimes panic inside interrupts handlers (most of the time it just freeze).

It's a hardware bug. I sent it back to the vendor and just received a new one (same model, though).
I will test it and if it keeps doing those nasty things, I'll just go for AMD Geode or similar.