Out of memory while booting?

[Charles G Montgomery]

I have a machine with what I suspect is a hardware problem, but I'm 
not a hardware person.  Perhaps someone might have a suggestion if 
I describe the problem.

The machine has an AMD 64 cpu, 2 GB memory, an ASUS A8V-XE 
motherboard. I run Debian testing (currently squeeze).

Booting starts normally and proceeds quite a way.  It gets as far as 
loading kernel modules and then starts issuing console error 
messages about being out of memory.  It starts killing processes 
until it has killed everything but init, and then just scrolls 
frantic out of memory messages forever -- only powering down can 
stop it.

I had two different kernels installed.  The behavior is exactly the 
same with either of them.  I tried booting from an OpenCD, which 
has Ubuntu on it.  All the hardware detection and initialization 
went fine.  There were no error messages.  But when it tried to 
start up X, all I got was a brown screen with a cursor (movable 
with the mouse) and no menus or keyboard response or any way to do 
anything.

I've taken the box down to Compucare in Peterborough.  The fellow 
there is a Windows guy and knows very little about Linux, but he 
knows hardware.  He has done memory tests and disk tests and found 
nothing.  He is going to copy a disk image to another machine and 
see if things work there.  But he's as baffled as I am.

If anyone has an idea what the problem might be, or just suggestions 
of things to test, that would be greatly appreciated.

regards cgm