Gnome...known issue?

[Tyr-7BE]

I'm a recent Win 98 convert running Drake 7.2. I tried KDE for a while and liked it quite a bit. I recently switched to Gnome as it has some aspects about it I like as well. Here's the problem: Every now and again while doing something stupidly simple like previewing a window theme, my computer's "think" light comes on (don't know what else to call it...that little red activity light on the front). When I listen to it, I can hear my hard drive going like crazy. Gradually, my mouse gets jerky and stops working. I've left it for 45 minutes, and it just doesn't stop...acts like it's performing hardcore operations when it just appears to be frozen. The only way for me to stop it is to press the reset button. Is this a known issue with Gnome? It's happened a few times in Gnome, but never before with KDE. Anyone know what's happening/how to stop it? TIA.

[plasmid]

Doesn't sound like a gnome problem. That light that goes crazy is the hard drive activity light. Next time it happens try to launch gtop which monitors the resources apps are using. see if you see a process using a lot of the cpu resources (like 90 somthing percent). If you want to, you can kill that app by right clicking on it and choosing 'sigterm' and if that doesn't do it 'sigkill' should. If this solves the problem, then you it is that application that is causing the problems.

hope that helps

-plasmid

[ovf]

It might also be a lack of swap space. gtop will show your current swap utilization.