Hibernate works in my Lappy

I have a Dell Inspiron 1000 (poor man's lappy :) ) notebook where I have dual boot with Fedora core 4 as one and other WinXP. As I normally use Fedora most of the time I wanted the hibernation mode to work in Fedora. After few months of digging in the net came over this website

Just followed the steps mentioned for Fedora core 4; eventhen it was not working giving kernel panic.

Then got busy with some other work and could not work on this again. Now I did try it again -
my hibernation works -- How? How? Through serious of brute force checks I came to know that it works in a specific situation; so still the problem is not solved -- the hibernation works if I close most of the memory consuming applications in my lappy; simply only if I have just the terminal running. If I have any applications like firefox running then hibernation does not work; the system hangs with a kernel panic....oops....!!

If I am right when I run the hibernation command the system writes the status of the program running to the swap and shuts the lappy off; that's what the above website also says. My swap space is 600MB(approx twice the size of my RAM which 256MB). But there seems to be a peculiar problem if the size of the programs to be saved in memory exceeds 220MB(my lppy uses only 220MB of memory) it just hangs with a kernel panic; is it related to memory size also? I do not have any clue....

If it is related to memory size, in few months I will be upgrading the memory and let me see what happens!! Fedora core 5 has integrated hibernate support in its kernel -- let me try this too after I upgrade my RAM.