I installed slackware a couple hours ago, and it seemed to be working great. After playing around with the settings, however, now I have X periodically stalling (about every 45 seconds, appears to be a regular time interval) for a period of about 3 seconds. During that time, the CPU usage spikes, nothing responds, including the mouse and keyboard (though it does buffer my keystrokes) until the little stall is over. Due to its periodic nature, I'm thinking it's some kind of program running periodically that has maybe a bad config file or something to that effect.

Has anyone else by chance run into this problem and know how to fix it, or at least give me a way to figure out what program or process is creating the CPU usage spikes?

Thanks very much,
-Tyson

UPDATE:
I just figured out which process is the offender: it's called "kcmshell." Maybe this sheds some light.

kmcshell is something to do with KDE. Try switching to GNOME or Blackbox and see if it still freezes. If it does then reinstall/uninstall KDE.

or just kill the pid for kmcshell and see if it stops or maybe you'll lock kde and have to hard boot... just do it without any other proggies running. :-)

Okay, I got it figured out...
when I go to the Control Center and try to configure LILO, and change to administrator mode to make changes, the Control Center just sits there saying "Loading" and never does anything. It doesn't freeze, and will let me change to other panels in the Control Center without problems.
It's at that point that the offending program (lol I forgot the name) opens and doesn't close. It eventually DOES close itself after about fifteen minutes or so (I have no idea why).
And by the way, I tried as good as I could to kill it and it wouldn't die. I even tried to send it, specifically, the KILL signal while root and it still didn't die. It's a persistent little bugger. Of course, I'm not very familiar with linux yet, and I may have not been using the kill command properly, so that may have just been because of me.

so anyway... as long as I don't go to that part of the Control Center, it's fine and I have no problems!

Thanks, everyone, for the help!