System Hanging

I am developing an application using RTP 6.0 on a “standard” PC host.

The PC has a 1.7 GHz P4 processor.

The problem is that occasionally the computer hangs such that the only
solution is to reset it.

I believe that (usually) the application processes are actually still
running but that I am unable to get any console I/O. There is no .core dump
produced.

I have tried setting the priority of a console shell process to the MAX (63)
in the hope that I could use that means to determine which process (I
assume) is consuming all of the CPU time. No luck - the console process is
unusable.

Is there some way to set up a console or telnet process such that it has
such a high priority that it cannot be frozen out by other lower priority
processes that may be hung in a loop?

We are using both samba (for development) and syslog extensively and suspect
that one of these is the problem - we were seeing a similar problem earlier
that occurred during a nightly backup job that backed up the development
code over a samba connection.

It is critical that I find out what is happening as the project is nearing
its end. Any help will be greatly appreciated.