'Policy stopped' hangs Dell XPS M1330

Binary package hint: transmission

Since upgrading to Ibex, Transmission hangs my Dell XPS M1330 periodically. Sometimes it takes minutes, other times it can be a day or so.

There is always a balloon pop-up saying something about the policy stopping because of transmission and from there on the laptop hangs. This is where the weird bit comes. If I press the power button, the machine comes out of the hanging state but appears to be very slow. 30 seconds or so later the machine hangs again. Another power button press results in the same outcome. Eventually after a few power button presses it hangs completely. Trying to start another application whilst in this stage makes the application hang on the 'loading xxxx' state.

The only way to get out of this is a hard reboot.

Transmission has become unusable in this version.

uname -a

Linux zander 2.6.27-7-generic #1 SMP Tue Nov 4 19:33:20 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

Lots of this in dmesg:

[ 1760.228101] bad: scheduling from the idle thread!
[ 1760.228109] Pid: 0, comm: swapper Tainted: P 2.6.27-7-generic #1
[ 1760.228115] [<c037c406>] ? printk+0x1d/0x1f
[ 1760.228125] [<c0122b8a>] dequeue_task_idle+0x2a/0x40
[ 1760.228133] [<c012107f>] dequeue_task+0xcf/0x130
[ 1760.228142] [<c012112a>] deactivate_task+0x1a/0x30
[ 1760.228151] [<c037ca23>] schedule+0x4b3/0x790
[ 1760.228160] [<c0380ff5>] ? notifier_call_chain+0x35/0x70
[ 1760.228171] [<c0151b55>] ? clockevents_notify+0x35/0x80
[ 1760.228204] [<f8859a43>] ? ticks_elapsed_in_us+0xb/0x4d [processor]
[ 1760.228234] [<f885a2d7>] ? acpi_state_timer_broadcast+0x36/0x39 [processor]
[ 1760.228252] [<c0153d82>] ? tick_nohz_stop_idle+0x12/0x70
[ 1760.228262] [<c0153e15>] ? tick_nohz_restart_sched_tick+0x35/0x180
[ 1760.228272] [<c01028cd>] cpu_idle+0xbd/0x140
[ 1760.228280] [<c036edd3>] rest_init+0x53/0x60

Although I'm not sure if this is related?