To followup to my previous post:
it also sent the machine to > 11 load (it normally hovers around 1-3) and
ate 600+MB of swap, when the normal swap usage when I have all I ever use
running is never more than 120 megs.

So it would appear I either have to rebuild the entire system (possibly
suffering this effect again) to update userland so I can build a new kernel,
or turn my sources back to before the sysctl change...

-Sean

--
/~\ The ASCII
\ / Ribbon Campaign                   Sean Davis
 X  Against HTML                       aka dive
/ \ Email!