Why is idle machine reported as 1.0 load average?

[Jeff Vian]

On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 21:43 -0500, B Wooster wrote:
> On Wed, 02 Feb 2005 13:31:20 -0700, Robin Laing
> <Robin.Laing at drdc-rddc.gc.ca> wrote:
> > B Wooster wrote:
> > > Using uptime, w, and top - I noticed that the current load average is
> > > listed as 1.0 - never falls below 1.0 - even though there is nothing
> > > going on on the machine, and top reports 99.8%+ idle time..
> 
> > How much memory?
> > You have 228 tasks listed?
> 
> 104 of those processes had "hotplug" in their name. I think there is
> some USB strangeness going on, every time I plugin and remove my SD
> Card Reader, I think 5-10 processes are created, most of which end up
> as zombies (I posted a message about this last week, but no reply on
> that yet).
> 
> Anyway, I rebooted my box, and now I see uptime is back close to 0.01
> when it reports 99% idle.
> 
> I guess I'll just have reboot the machine every week or so !
> 

When you remove the card reader, do you unmount it first?
If not that can easily leave active processes dead/zombied.