GNOME perodically accesses my disk

["F. Kappen" <kappen tfh-berlin de>]

Hi all,

I am running Debian sarge on my Laptop. Recently I noticed that GNOME
periodically accesses the disk  (Every 5 seconds or so, the disk is
accessed for about 1 second). This only happens when GNOME is running.
Without a running Xfree/GNOME, i. e. only the console terminal is up,
the disk is quiet.

I wonder if this is OK? Or did I setup GNOME the wrong way? Is GNOME
looking for something that should be present. but really is absent?

I would be glad, if someone could comment on this.

Cheers
Friedhelm