why are my system resources being pillaged?

[honey toast]

Hi, I'm using a jaunty on my hp mini 1030nr and for some reason my cpu is being hammered by unseen processes. I cannot locate why or what is causing this, but I have a suspicion. I think that I am logged in as root, but I'm not sure how I would have done that, because I simply logged in to my mini the same way that I always do. In the event that I am logged in as root, then how would I not? What else can I do as a remedy for this? I'm plugged in at the library and the sound of my mini is getting me looks from people nearby. HELP!
Here is a paste of top...


top - 15:34:48 up 2 days, 4:19, 2 users, load average: 1.40, 1.37, 1.17
Tasks: 128 total, 1 running, 127 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 48.3%us, 3.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 47.5%id, 0.0%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2053532k total, 797636k used, 1255896k free, 33964k buffers
Swap: 714852k total, 0k used, 714852k free, 454160k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2722 root 20 0 311m 36m 10m S 57 1.8 26:17.31 Xorg
6338 1000 20 0 39616 19m 13m S 41 1.0 13:43.51 gnome-system-mo
6851 1000 20 0 152m 84m 48m S 6 4.2 1:38.95 avastgui
7052 1000 20 0 34000 14m 9480 S 2 0.7 0:02.63 gnome-terminal
5728 1000 20 0 185m 94m 24m S 1 4.7 8:22.33 firefox
7179 1000 20 0 2448 1188 912 R 1 0.1 0:00.73 top
2651 root 20 0 5180 1796 1588 S 0 0.1 0:01.06 hald-addon-stor
3324 1000 20 0 23984 10m 8644 S 0 0.5 1:00.06 multiload-apple
1 root 20 0 3084 1884 564 S 0 0.1 0:01.72 init
2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.02 migration/0
4 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:01.96 ksoftirqd/0
5 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
9 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.16 events/0
11 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
12 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kstop/0
14 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kintegrityd/0
16 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.07 kblockd/0
18 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.04 kacpid
19 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 kacpi_notify
20 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 cqueue
21 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/0
23 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ata_aux

[Whiffle]

I see Xorg and gnome-system monitor taking up quite a bit...not much other than that.

[cariboo]

Turn off the gnome-system-monitor as it adds quite a bit of overhead, also shutdown avast, as it isn't doing you any good scanning for windows viruses.

[utnubuuser]

You could try googling your video-card as well. If your card isn't configured properly it'll hog resources.