> I guess trying to free up some RAM by moving things to swap (the swap partition was full by this point) In that case, it cannot be moving things the swap sin

> I guess trying to free up some RAM by moving things to swap (the swap partition was full by this point) In that case, it cannot be moving things the swap since it was alreay full. What did probably happen is that since the swap was already full and not enough it started to trash the system by paging out the executable files in the memory. Ironically enough you'd probably have much smaller risk of trashing had the system have more swap space.