Whenever I start my Debian Lenny testing laptop a process called ntop starts
and quickly consumes 99% of my cpu. If I kill the process, nothing happens.
If I run ntop from the command line, it does what the man page says it does,
and hardly consumes any resources at all. There is an ntop in /etc/init.d/,
and when I run /etc/init.s/ntop it consumes very few resources - the script
calls /usr/sbin/ntop. There are no entries in the /var/log/ntop/access.log
file.

My questions are:

Do I have a virus masquerading as ntop, and if so how do I remove it? I
googled "linux ntop virus" and did not come up with anything useful.

Can I just remove ntop from /etc/init.d/ ?

How do I find out if another startup program needs ntop?

Is ntop necessary at startup?

Thanks!

Mark