Have you had or heard of odd behaviour apparently, at least partly, from the combination of Firefox and Gnome? After visiting a site to find out who an apparently well known singer is, I found FF paging through previous pages of its own volition, and the system as a whole hanging and slowing down. The site (devoted to one Lily Allen if it helps) kept reappearing, but the same thing happened also with the Independent site, several pages of which suddenly reappeared in the middle of reading OSNews. I thought it must be something nefarious, but what? The Independent? It seemed to hang on OSN while waiting for bilbo.counted.

System Monitor doesn't reveal anything very odd, though there are spikes on the graph of 30% cpu usage, when the process table shows nothing using more than a few percent, and that is mainly system monitor itself.

Moving to Konqueror didn't help. Deleting all cookies and turning off Java and Javascript didn't help. Epiphany didn't help. It happened a bit with OO but not to anything like the same extent.

I more or less fixed it finally by moving to KDE. But the runaway process indicator occasionally pops up and warns about Firefox, if the threshold is set to 20%.

This is on Etch AMD64, a reasonably decent Sempron with 1G memory, which of course has FF 1.5, not 2.0. Fully up to date. This am in fact, it just updated a bunch of stuff, including CUPS. Any ideas what it could be or on what else to check?

I am also getting slowdowns while typing this into Kmail, which is also generating one of those warnings.... Crazy. How can it take 20%+ of cpu just to handle a few text entries?

Peter