A tale of Gentoo and bad memory

So, I have that 400Mhz box kicking around under my desk. It's not powerful enough to do anything graphical, but I have been looking around for a new test box; I hauled it out, plugged in all the relevant cords and cables, and lo and behold, it booted...into a bios (oh boy)

I've already tried out Gentoo on an old Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, but there's something screwy with it, because I could never get it to install correctly. Now that I had that "new" test machine, I decided to give Gentoo another shot.

I booted from the 2007.0 livecd, followed the guide here, and I was set. I rebooted, and a working system came up on the first time. I know that there are probably a bunch of gentoo experts reading this and thinking 'What a moron, to get excited because it worked the first time', but if you'd been there during the Gentoo on Inspiron debacle, you'd understand my frame of mind.

So there I was with a perfectly working computer, now I needed to install software. Of course, I wanted this to be remotely accessible, so I had sshd running so I could access it from my desktop computer (way easier than switching chairs).

Emerge screen....yay! Success!

Emerge vim....yay! Success!

Emerge x11-xorg....ya...no, wait...what happened? ssh connection closed by $REMOTEHOSTIP ? What do you mean, I can't raise my computer by using the keyboard? No response? Huh, must be a freak occurence...hard reboot and...
Emerge x11-xorg...same problem, hard reboot needed.

So, I jump on the #gentoo channel on freenode and ask the gentoo gurus what's going on. The general consensus seems to be that it's hardware related, so here I am, running memtest86+...for the next 20 hours or so. If it's a bad stick, I'll just yank one out, since I've got 2x256Mb installed, and I don't really need all that RAM...

If it's not the RAM, I guess I'll have to get another test box, which brings me to my next story....which I'll relate tomorrow. If anyone has any other ideas on what it could be, go ahead and leave a comment!