Re: gnus makes emacs lose response

[Richard Stallman]

    >From the backtrace, it looks Emacs is hanging on the select call.  My
    guess is that the unplugged network cable causes select to wait
    forever, in spite of the non-NULL timeout argument passed to it.  If
    this is true, it's a bug in the select system call, and there's little
    Emacs can do to work around it.

Can you verify that the select call is really doing this?
If it is really a kernel bug, let's get it reported, so it will get fixed.