This is most likely a problem with the display drivers for the ati m6 card in red hat 9 but I wanted to see if anyone else had seen this behavior.
When I have two or more opengl contexts on the screen, resizing or moving the awt frame that one or more of them is in causes the entire display to lock up. If I ssh in from another box I see nothing in the kernal logs.
I am using Red Hat 9 with ATI m6 7000.
I’ve been doing some research and it seems that this problem may be related to AGP instabilities. Try disabling AGP and see if the problem goes away. There were also some people who were able to get a stable system by adjust the agp bus speed (forcing it down to 1x instead of 2x or 4x) and adjusting the agp aperture size.
The other possibility that I came across so far is that there may be registers in the chipset that are buggy. Check the chipset versions in the machines that are having the problems and see if they are the same, if so, check if there are fixes for any issues with that chipset.
The other thing to try would be to rebuild the kernel with the latest version from kernel.org. There may be AGP (or other fixes) in the latest version.