Im pretty sure it's some cron of some sort.. though im very new with cron and haven't really looked into it but aside from that, is there anyway I can figure out whats creating hard drive activity? ever so often my system comes to a crawl, even in console mode and the hard drives reading writing(?) like mad.

I want to figure out whats causing it!!!

I went to top and saw that msec_find was at the top of processes for a little bit (though i don't think that was cuaseing the problem) anyone know what that is? theirs no man for it.

thanks.
Ben.

It's a script that is started from cron and what it does is some basic security checks. One of which is scan your harddrive to find out if any of the files are world writeable. That probably explains the harddrive activity.

If you are ever clueless about some weird script often going over to www.google.com/linux and then typing in the name will get you loads of information.