Kernel panic, "Aiee, killing interrupt handler!"

Lately I have had my box freeze up just after connecting, although it doesn't happen every time.. I am not sure exactly what the factors are that make it crash.

When I was having the freezes yesterday I watched syslog from a terminal and wrote down some of the output on paper (I did a search in my syslog file just now and it I don't have any of this... maybe because the data was still in cache and didn't get written to disk?):

--
PPP BSD Compresseion module registered
PPP Deflate Compression module registered

Unable to handle kernel paging requestat virtual address 010000a
  printing eip:
010000a
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0

EIP
--

...this is where I stopped writing, was further debugging messages. They would have been no use to me but at the time I wasn't considering writing to this list, now I am thinking maybe they would have been useful... I got a bit more of the messages though:

--

Code: Bad EIP value.

<0>Kernel panicL Aiee, killing interrupt handler!
In interrupt handler - not syncing
--

I also noticed a weird startup message, although I have no idea whether this is related:

--
/etc/init.d/rc: line 6: 180 Segmentation fault $debug "$@" --

One other message I see in syslog a few times, and also am not sure whether it is related:

--
pppd[357]: Cannot determine ethernet address for proxy ARP --

Has anyone had similar problems? I asked around a bit on IRC and I was recommended to try asking on this list.

Regards,
Daniel Mundy