I'm using Slack 9.1 - I had been using it before, switched to Gentoo, then switched back to the same Slack. Suddenly I'm having problems I've never had before.

Whenever I start up my computer (and other random, unpredictable times) my computer just freezes, System Monitor shows swap use jump to 100%, then it stops working for around a minute or so. After that, processor use jumps from 0 to 100%, and swap drops to 0.

My HD is 20 GB, I allocated 512 MB to /dev/hda2, 32 to /dev/hda1 and the rest to /dev/hda3. I've got 512 MB RAM, so I figured 512 MB of swap would be enough.

Any ideas of what could be going wrong? Could it be a processor problem?

Try to find out what process is using up the CPU (and probably also causing swap problems) - run 'top' in a terminal window and see which program is using all the CPU when it occurs.

also, try killing the processes that eat cpu (type "k" and then the process number and then confirm) and watch what happens.

See, I would do that... The only problem is that when the process is eating everything up, I can't DO anything. Sometimes it even occurs while opening a terminal window.

Plus, the process is most likely killed or at least brought down to an acceptable level by the time I can even move my mouse...

If you leave 'top' running, though, it might at least show the offending process before things get too sluggish to do anything.

OK, I took your suggestion up, and the process that seems to be taking up all the memory/CPU is kdeinit. There seem to be a few running at once, and one of them is taking 43% of everything when the system freezes. Plus, at this time, my computer has been frozen for around 10 minutes, and still going strong (using a Windoze box now........)