Disk thrashing, Please HELP!

[Rosina Bignall]

My apologies if you get two copies of this message.  I wrote it
in a hurry the first time and did it before I had confirmed my
subscription, so it's waiting for the moderator's approval.
Also, I forgot to include some system information the first time,
so here it is again with some additional information:

Recently, I started having problems with my disk drive thrashing,
but I can't figure out why.  It happens even after a reboot,
shortly after X starts, so I think it has something to do with X.
It started after I added some new fonts (which have since been
deleted since I thought that might be the problem), but deleting
them didn't fix the problem.  So, I'm not sure if that has
anything to do with the problem. The swap is practically unused 
(99% free).  Top shows:


08:30:54  up  1:27,  4 users,  load average: 2.67, 2.65, 2.36
86 processes: 83 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  iowait
     idle
            total   15.1%    0.0%    2.1%   1.1%     0.0%   81.4%
    0.0%
Mem:   384288k av,  376960k used,    7328k free,       0k shrd,
  63960k buff
                     286348k actv,   68208k in_d,    1904k in_c
Swap:  947816k av,   11004k used,  936812k free
140412k cached

   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME
CPU COMMAND
  3984 root      16   0 59460  25M  3456 R     5.9  6.7   2:25   0 X
11295 rbignall  15   0 53980  52M 20300 S     4.3 14.0   1:17   0
mozilla-bin
  6421 rbignall  15   0 12684  12M 10412 S     3.7  3.2   0:49
0 appletproxy
  4129 rbignall  15   0 13828  13M 11232 R     1.1  3.5   0:02
0 kdeinit
  1997 root      15   0     0    0     0 DW    0.5  0.0   0:17
0 kjournald
  4114 rbignall  15   0 12676  12M 10280 S     0.1  3.2   0:04
0 kdeinit
  4120 rbignall  15   0 16180  15M 12792 S     0.1  4.2   0:15
0 kdeinit

I am running Redhat WS 3 which was fully updated (until Friday's
updates which I'm in the process of downloading), 384 MB RAM +
about 1GB swap.  I'm using KDE which I'd been using for about a
week before this started.  I booted up in runlevel 3 and had no 
thrashing, which leads me to suspect even more it has something 
to do with X or KDE.

I am at a loss as to how to figure out what is causing the
thrashing, let alone how to fix it.  Can someone please help?

Thanks,
Rosina

-- 

Rosina Bignall
rbignall at earthlink.net