RH 8.0 Locked, No Panic Msg, Blinking LEDs

Hey folks, here's a problem that's been gnawing at me for the last 24 hours:

Yesterday evening I was messing about with g++ on the console as I've decided to pick up C++ (nothing complex, was just playing with some simple pointers). After a while I decided to take a break and launched GNOME. I played some games and popped around the net for a few minutes and, while I was doing that, BAM, everything locked. The screen froze, I couldn't send signals... just like that everything was stuck.

Then I noticed the keyboard. The CAPS and SCROLL lock LEDs were blinking simultaneously. The Num Lock LED was off, and, if I tried to turn it on, it turned itself off again after about a second. At first, I thought I was experiencing a kernel panic, but I had no panic message, and I couldn't get into a console. Finally, after trying everything I could think of and find in my books and looking on the Internet from a different box, I had to (fearfully) resort to the big red button.

After the system came back up, I couldn't find any signs of an oops in anything. I didn't even have any core dumps. I've been unable to reproduce this error.

The specs follow - if anyone can help guide me in the right direction for a resolution, I would be quite thankful. I fear I may just be looking in the wrong places for my answer :

RH 8.0 running on 2.14.18 kernel (distro standard, haven't recompiled it yet).

PIII 866 Mhz, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB Maxtor. I was on the net using a 56Kbps "V.92" Creative Modemblaster at the time (not natively supported by the kernel). I was in GNOME and had Nautilus, Mozilla, and Evolution running.

The only recent change I had made was to give "Others" read access to some pppd and wvdial related files so non-root users can dial an Internet connection.

Thanks!

Flashing LED's are the sign of a kernel panic.