Terminal freezes

My Terminal locks up. When this has happened, I have had only one or two Terminal windows open, and they had been open for as little as just a few minutes, or as long as a few hours, before the lockup occurred. This has happened about 10 times in the last week, which accounts for the majority of times I have used Terminal on this machine.

I will be in the middle of typing something in a local shell (so no remote connectivity issues at play, here), and the beachball cursor will appear, and seemingly stay that way indefinitely (hours, at least), until I Force Quit the Terminal.

It has always seemed to happen when I am typing at a shell prompt, and I have noticed it always echoes the first few characters before locking up, so it's not like it locked up while I was idle, and I just didn't notice it until I tried to type something.

This problem seems to be limited to Terminal.app; I haven't seen this behavior with anything else. Additionally, it does not seem to matter what other programs I have running--this has happened after a reboot with no other apps running, except for the Synergy client which starts on boot.

Here's the interesting part: This problem has followed me from Tiger to Leopard. I just upgraded to Leopard a few days ago, and the problem still remains. In both Tiger and Leopard, I was/am current with all Apple updates.

This problem started about a week ago. I upgraded a few days ago.