mysterious disk access every 5 or 10 seconds

[Yung-Hsiang Lu <luyung yahoo com>]

Hi,

If this is not the right place for the question, my
apology.

I install Redhat Linux 6.1 with gnome.  After I log in
to gnome desktop, without doing anything else, the
disk LED flashes every 5 or 10 (not 5 to 10, it is
either 5 or 10) seconds.  I followed the suggestion in
Battery-Powered Linux HOWTO to turn off unused daemons
and enlarge update intervals.  If I do not log in, the
problem doesn't occur.  My suspect is that something
in gnome is periodically reading / writing to the
disk. No other user program is running, no gcc, no
emacs, no netscape.

The machine is 128MB RAM; therefore, swapping doesn't
seem a problem.

Does anybody have an idea what could be wrong?  Due to
these mysterious disk accesses, power management on
the disk is useless.

Thanks a lot!

=====
Sincerely,
Yung-Hsiang Lu

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