a really stupid question, from an inquiring mind?

[Apollo]

I had a similar problem with a beta version of Gentoo 1.2.  I never figured
out what the fix was but after updating to 1.3 the problems went away.  I
was able to determine that it had to do with the version of Mozilla I was
using.  I don't know if this helps by maybe updating your brouser will fix
the problem.

DH

...
> While editing an e-mail using my ISP's program (nothing on my machine
> but the browser), my computer goes into frantic gyrations, with almost
> continuous disk access, and this time lost communication with the mouse
> and keyboard, so I had to do a warm reset.
>
> NOw other times I"ve seen this it would go on for hours, and looking at
> KSystemGuard, the CPU activity goes to near 100%.  Is it just that the
> swap is gone bonkers?  This has no rhyme or reason to it, and is very
> random, usually weeks or months between occurances.
...