Memory leak????

Hi all, I was debugging my program. I did a mistake implementing the list, so it took all the memory from both RAM and Swap. There is nothing strange with it, but when I killed that program, my system remained sluggish. Memory was freed (according to both "free" and xosview) but the system was very slow. According to xosview "LOAD" was very high, over 9.0, but my RAM was completely empty (well, almost) and my processor was doing almost nothing (0% according to xosview and top). I decided to reboot, just like in my winbloz days, but it froze trying to remove the sound driver. I do not think this is normal. I am using Suse 8.0. Praise