I am running KDE 4.1.3 under Suse Enterprise. I have several konsole terminals open with several tabs. They are all locked up, meaning I cannot type anything in them, I cannot change tabs, and I cannot even close them. I had a "top" command running in one tab and could not exit that either, though it kept running normally. The top command shows there is 4 GB of memory, 2 GB used, 1.5 GB free, 6m buffers. I can open new xterm and Gnome terminals and use those normally. I can open a new konsole terminal, but I cannot use it: it is in the same state as the old ones. Has anybody seen this?

I've never seen this before. If the contents of those terminals are not valuable, could you try killing all running "konsole" processes and starting it up again to see if this reoccurs?

Thank you for the reply. I was unable to keep my machine in that state any longer and had to log off - which took much more time than usually, by the way. With a fresh session, the problem was solved. I also retrieved all my old konsoles and tabs where I left them. Had I killed these konsoles before logging off, I don't think it would have changed anything, as new konsoles were not working either. My uptime was quite high when this happened; I'd guess at least 2 months. My experience is that my OS systematically gets stuck one way or another if I stay logged in long enough. Two months is actually good. Very often, I think the reason was that memory did not get freed and the OS ran out. As I happened to have a "top" process running now, I know it was not the case this time. This is my OS:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (x86_64)
VERSION = 11
PATCHLEVEL = 0

kernel: 2.6.27.19-5-default

This was possibly an issue caused by an update - as certain types of updates can cause KDE to encounter problems with starting new applications. It could also have been a lack of memory as well - although I would only suspect this if you were experiencing graphical glitches as well at the time - and only with an Intel card.

No graphical glitches; my card is nVidia Quadro FX 570.

Okay. If you re-experience this issue, feel free to re-open this thread. It certainly seems like a graphics or upgrade problem, but if you cannot reproduce it, it is probably a one-off situation.

One possible reason: you are browsing some folder belong to remote filesystem(nfs, sshfs, etc) and that filesystem becomes unaccessible due to various reasons(network connection lost, remote machine problme).

That's a known problem of Konsole. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=251351 and https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279133