I remember many years ago I had a computer where, sometimes, programs crashed when trying to launch them. They segfaulted for no apparent reason. If I rebooted

I remember many years ago I had a computer where, sometimes, programs crashed when trying to launch them. They segfaulted for no apparent reason. If I rebooted the computer, they may work. It usually happened with big programs like Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. I once noticed that I didn't had to reboot the computer to make them work: just emptying the caches (/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches). In fact, the md5sum of the binaries giving troubles, before and after emptying the caches, were different: one random byte had a different value. I never knew what caused the problems, I always thought it was either an unsupported device or a faulty component, however things like memtest never reported any issue. When I got a new computer and was about to dispose that one (finally!) somebody told me it could be related to electricity problems. I then had that computer plugged to a different outlet during its last week and, apparently, I got no issues; however, issues didn't always happen, so I never knew if that was the cause or not.