Hey Guys!

I heard a lot of HDD activity, seemingly out-of-the-blue while IceWeasel had already been up and running for a while- so being curious as to what was going on, I took a look at HTOP....and what I saw scared me [or is this normal, and I just never noticed before?]

Look at the "user" column- why all those "root", "ntp", "messagebu" entries, when I'm looged in as "Bob"? [My name is not Bob...I don't put my real name on my 'puter]

What's going on here?
[Running Crunchbang on old P4 -at no point today nor in the recent past was I logged in as root]

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Those are background processes. Just because you're logged in as bob doesn't mean the machine isn't running other services in the background as other users. In your list you can see root running your X session, dhclient to negotiate with the DHCP server on your network, system logging daemons, cron, bluetooth, ntp is keeping your system clock synchronized with the national time servers, etc.

"SumGuy" is asking why Bob is listed as a user on his htop screen when "SumGuy" never logs
in as "Bob" as a user. I'd like to know the answer too. I don't see it yet.

That's not what he asked. He very clearly said he IS logged in as Bob, and he's wondering what all of the other processes that do NOT belong to Bob are doing there:

I clearly read the following on "SumGuy":
"[My name is not Bob...I don't put my real name on my 'puter]"
He's complaing that somebody, or something, other than himself has logged in as Bob! He wrote, "My name is not Bob...I don't put my real name on my 'puter'."
Now do you see what "SumGuy" is saying?

That is indeed confusing. After doing the Linda Blair thing with my head a few times, here is what I think he is saying...

He IS logged in as user name "Bob".
"Bob" is not his real name, which is irrelevant and a red herring as far as his problem description...
He has not recently logged in as root, but sees root owned processes which worries him...

From that I would say that suicidal got it right - those are normal processes.

For a P4 of which I still run a few, that is a pretty normal looking list and activity level.

EDIT - I also note that the previous last post in this thread was November 2014, so while it may not actually be necroposting, you have awakened a sound sleeper!

Yes, he's logged in as "bob", but "bob" is not his real name, because he doesn't use his real name on his computer. In other words, "bob" is his user name, not his real name. Similarly, "suicidaleggroll" is my user name, but not my real name.