> To the untutored eye everything looks reasonable.  

Yeah, I'd say that. 

> The Mem used is creeping up all the time.

Normally, that's OK as well, since Linux wants to use all the available
memory -- what's not active for programs is used for disk and for cache,
which is a good idea, since unused RAM is wasted.

But having the system slow down to a crawl is certainly not normal. Some
people on the list suggest the offender may be jabberd but I'm not sure
that's something you installed (do a ps aux | grep jabber). jabberd is
something that is known to gradually swallow RAM -- on my machine it
was eating about 200 megs (out of 256) after about 3 days.

It may be something else that's eating the memory -- that's why I suggested
running top.

> Drastic it may be, but I may have to.  Could you elaborate, please?

Well, you just click on 'logout' from KDE which will kill all KDE and
X related processes, leaving you at a console shell prompt (if you start
kde with 'startkde').

> The KDE startup was extremely slow and everything else has been slow since.
> 
> The system is almost unusable.

Ouch. How long has it been since you restarted? 

> Anne

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