Jurgen Philippaerts <jurgen@see.my.pgp.key> wrote in message news:<20030903075533.GA365@anubis.is.traumatized.o rg>...
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> verify the source tarballs with the original files on the ftp site,
> making sure signatures match. you'ge got some crazy things happening
> there
>

Well, I think I have finally narrowed down and eliminated the problem.
It seems to have been caused by a particular install CD I was using.
I have two copies of my custom slack 9 CD. Both are identical (or
should be), other than the kernel used for booting. The "bad" CD uses
the stock kernels included with the Slack 9 CD1. On the good CD I
recompiled all of the kernels to use SMP and disable USB because of a
weird conflict I was having with an Adaptec SCSI card (it only works
with an SMP kernel).

I finally realized that the Slack 9 machines that were not getting
corrupted had all been installed with the SMP kernel CD, while the two
systems I was writing about here had been constantly installed and
reinstalled with the stock kernel CD. Perhaps something got munged
during the ISO creation or the CD burning, or even afterwards. At
this point, I don't even want to bother to figure out what was wrong
with it. I cracked the bad CD in half in front of my other CDs as a
lesson to them

Thanks everyone for all of the suggestions put forth!

Aleks