During Run 5, the beam in the PEP-II Low Energy Ring (LER) became affected by a predominantly vertical instability with very fast growth rate of 10...60/ms and varying threshold. The coherent amplitude of the oscillation was limited to approx. 1 mm peak and would damp down over a few tens of turns, however, beam loss set in even as the amplitude signal damped, causing a beam abort. This led to the conclusion that the bunches were actually blowing up. The appearance of a 2{nu}{sub S} line in the spectrum suggested a possible head-tail nature of the instability, although chromaticity was not effective in changing the threshold. The crucial hints in tracking down the cause turned out to be vacuum activity near the rf cavities and observance of signals on the cavity probes of certain rf cavities
