Why is my system slowing down?

[Josef Lowder]

Still hoping for some suggestions on how to solve the subject problem. 

In a recent previous message, I did reply to the only two suggestions 
that I had received, which ask what my disk usage was and what 'top' 
showed.  Here are those answers: 

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6             9.7G  7.3G  1.9G  80% /
/dev/hdb1             4.0G  1.3G  2.7G  32% /mnt/windows

top - 10:12:33 up 3 days,  2:03,  3 users,  load average: 1.13, 1.44, 1.94
Tasks:  96 total,   1 running,  95 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 75.7% us,  2.3% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id, 21.6% wa,  0.3% hi,  0.0%
si Mem:    515484k total,   509460k used,     6024k free,     1704k buffers
Swap:  1269084k total,   100368k used,  1168716k free,   334524k cached

   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 3923 joe       15   0  137m  73m 5868 S 64.2 14.6   2708:27 kded
23690 joe       15   0 70620  37m  25m S  0.0  7.5   0:08.93 kontact

Prior to this recent drastic slowdown, kmail used to open in 1 or 2 seconds. 
Now it takes up to 30 seconds and sometimes it doesn't open at all. 
A terminal shell window used to open instantaneously, and now it can 
take from 10 to 15 seconds to open. 

I did not make any changes in my system, so can't imagine why this 
drastic slowdown has occurred. 

Hope someone can offer some guidance to solve this mystery. 

Thanks, 

joe at actionline.com