Every couple of days or so my system hangs (ie. I can't login or su to root) and i have 100+ crond processes running. It seems to stem from when the security checks are run at 4am in the morning. I have made no changed to any of these files but it has happened on all the machines i have installed mandrake onto... Any ideas ?

What kind of security checks do you run? Do you by any chance start the crond in one of your security scripts. Maybe you have a script which attempts to check if crond is running which isn't functioning properly and starting a new version of crond every X time. Check all the scripts which are started from "/etc/crontab". Mandrake includes entries for starting all the script files in the directories "/etc/cron.hourly", "/etc/cron.daily", etc..... Are these security scripts running correctly on other systems? Mik

Well I had to reinstall due to a HDD crash and i didn't install logcolorise (a nice little perl script that colorises the syslog output) and so it seems that was the cause of the hassle...strange..I will go through the install notes again but i am pretty sure that was the problem...pity because it was a nice little perl script. Thanks for the help Mik