occasional Gnome desktop crashes, [2175]: cr_parser_new_from_buf: assertion 'a_buf && a_len' failed, 20.04.3 LTS [closed]

Solution 1:

It turns out these messages are a bit of a red herring. Although there still may be an issue with GDM, the real issue is that at least one of the memory modules is bad and that's what was causing the freezing. What made this even more annoying was we could not get Memtest86 to run, as a working memory chip is required on this system to even boot to a USB/DVD!