Interesting Observation, RH 8.0, Samba 3.0

> "Service crond status" shows cron running. When I loaded the OS I didn't
> remember setting this up? 8-(

RH has certain things set up by default to be run by cron.

> These seem tobe running at 1,2,3,4 in the morning (as I read the book
> "Running Linux" - O'Reilly).
>
> The unusual activity took place just before noon and the computer's clock
> (via GUI) shows to be about 10 min fast.

Anacron is a cron program that will actually run with an accuracy of a days
rather than minutes. So it is quite possible for anacron to be setting
something off in the middle of the day (log files needing rotating or
compressing ala logrotate scripts).