Redhat 9 - inexplicable high load while low CPU usage and no I/O

[Iulian Musat]

Hello everybody !

I have a strange problem with a machine running Redhat 9, kernel 
2.4.20-20.7smp.

For no obvious reason the load reaches high values (4-5). In the same 
time top reports CPU usage of only ~0.1% user and system. There are no 
processes running on this machine (besides the 'standard' ones). There 
is no disk activity and I couldn't detect anything special with the 
network traffic.

I don't mind a 'wrong' report for the load, but the machine is really slow.

The only process that I see using some CPU is 'kupdated', which I 
believe have something to do with memory allocation.

I checked the logs and there is nothing unusual there.

The machine has two Intel Xeon 2.4GHz CPUs, 2GB RAM and one ATA EIDE 
250GB HDD.

I am running out of ideas here and I would really appreciate any advice, 
any suggestions, anything. The last think to do will be to reinstall the 
  system (somone else did the installation) and hope for the best...

Regards,
-Iulian