Gradual Slowdown, Dramatic For Cds

As my OpenSuSE 10.3 installation runs for a while, it gradually slows down. This is noticeable in all programs (including Yast and Firefox) but quite dramatic for operations involving CDs, whether writing them in k3b or just copying their contents to the desktop. Copying an ordinary CD can take half an hour on either of my two drives, and k3b displays its splash screen for five minutes before doing anything! My hardware should be quite adequate -- I have a dual-core x64 3GHz machine with 2GB of memory. Running top reveals nothing obvious.

I know this is a very general complaint, but does anyone have suggestions as to where to start looking for the cause?

when you ran top, was beagle in there ? if so, i suggest you remove it. if not, post the output of top when the slow-down occurs,so that we can have a look