Hi, Can any kind person explain to me what causes a process to run out of control, and whether a problem I have begun to experience is just a fact of linux life or is specific to my system ? I am running SuSE 7 on a PIII 800 / 815e mobo / XFree v4 / Afterstep WM. I first saw the problem when running faxgetty. For no particular reason the process suddenly (unpredictably) rises to 99% cpu usage. I thought initially that this might be unique to faxgetty, but I have seen it now with xman and asmodem (a simple modem monitor for Afterstep). Both of these have only run out of control once, and are otherwise well-behaved. I never see the problem begin, but then I glance at my system monitor and there it is. Thanks in anticipation, Geoff _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com