something's eating my ram/processor

[Duncan Lithgow]

I won't start posting many details because I can't work out what is
relevant. The symptoms are:

a.) logging off is taking close to 30 seconds, even if i've hardly used
any apps. this is also true of the root user.

b.) nope, there are no network users.

c.) nautilus shows up as using 7.7MB and if i halt or kill it a nautilus
windows pops up located on /home. That process then has the same
properties. It even did this one time when I had logged in and only used
firefox - never even started nautilus. It shows up in 'System Monitor"
as Memory: 53.3MB, X Server Memory: 7.7MB, Nice: 0, ID: 6101, Status:
Sleeping, RSS: 21.6MB, Shared: 10.4MB

d.) The little gnome applet shows "processor 100%" and everything takes
for ever.

e.) evolution gets mail only every 15 minutes.

What can I do to extract useful information?

Hmm, I just thought to use winetools to kill all wine processes - that's
brought processor down to normal levels.

nope that's not it - the processor usage drops as soon as i click on the
gnome drawer holding my wine apps. and rockets again as soon as i close
the drawer. killing all wine processes doesn't help.

Duncan