RH 4-U3 is either crashing or hanging when I do "opcontrol --start"

[Vasiili G. <vig...@gm...>]

I am trying to get oprofile running on Linux 2.6 (RedHat). Following is a
cat of /proc/cpuinfo:

processor : 0

vendor_id : GenuineIntel

cpu family : 15

model : 4

model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.66GHz

stepping : 7

cpu MHz : 2666.576

cache size : 1024 KB

physical id : 0

siblings : 2

core id : 0

cpu cores : 2

fpu : yes

fpu_exception : yes

cpuid level : 5

wp : yes

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat
pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm pni monitor
ds_cpl tm2 cid cx16 xtpr

bogomips : 5342.17

clflush size : 64

cache_alignment : 128

address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual

power management:

processor : 1

vendor_id : GenuineIntel

cpu family : 15

model : 4

model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.66GHz

stepping : 7

cpu MHz : 2666.576

cache size : 1024 KB

physical id : 0

siblings : 2

core id : 1

cpu cores : 2

fpu : yes

fpu_exception : yes

cpuid level : 5

wp : yes

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat
pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm pni monitor
ds_cpl tm2 cid cx16 xtpr

bogomips : 5332.05

clflush size : 64

cache_alignment : 128

address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual

power management:

When I try to do a "opcontrol  --start", the kernel either hangs or crashes. 
I have peppered the oprofile "driver" code with printk's to try and isolate 
the problem. It is doing a bunch of default_open's and also calls to 
ulong_write_file. Any ideas how I can track this problem down?

Regards, Bill