Lingering Users and Painfully Slow OpenOffice Startup

[R. Scott Belford]

Aloha

I have been monitoring some classes this week on a newly installed
Edubuntu 7.10 server with /home loaded over nfs.  These classes use
OpenOffice extensively for their spreadsheet curricula.

I notice that, independent of OpenOffice, user processes continue running
even after a logout.  It seems that this is the current hack, but is there
something systemic that I can help track down?

www.morokeni.ch/edubuntu/gnome-watchdog_0.9.2_i386.deb

Also, I notice that it is taking OpenOffice somewhere in the neighborhood
of 2 minutes to open.  Is there something to do to lessen this load?

To give you an example.  In the room now.  30 kids on the floor.  30
workstations logged in with a spreadsheet open. No one is on the
terminals, yet running htop reveals an average load of about 50% on my
dual cpu opteron-based server.  2gb of our 4gb of RAM are in use.  This
seems to be an alarming load for no activity.

Suggestions or requests for more information are most welcome.

--scott