Poll outcome

For anyone hanging on the edge of their seat for the outcome of my poll, dear reader I slew it. The symptoms had worsened and a mercy killing was the only option.

A fairly exhaustive memory test, run overnight, confirmed that at least my memory was OK, so the most likely candidate for a hardware fault was eliminated. Reinstalling (in my spare time, and hindered by a 24-hour broadband outage) is going slowly, but steadily, and the system appears stable, even with the updates that might have caused the problem re-applied.

Fingers crossed!