GUI hangs while application access hard disk

Hi
I upgraded to opensuse 11.1 two mounth ago and now randomly I’m experinecing the following.
The Gnome gui (2.26) is very very slow; I’m unable to choose an application from the System->Monitor menu item to know something about the running application.
This happens while I have no particular applications running only Kmail is open.
The acces-to-disk light is always on
The only hint I get after switch to Ctrl+Alt+F2 and running

ps ax

is the IndexHelper background process of beagle.
I killed it using

kill nnnn

but nothing changed.

  • Is it possible that the IndexHelper slow down my machine so abruptly?
  • Is there a way to know which is the application that access the hard disk from the line command?

In a terminal type: top