problem with intermittent slow login, sudo and kdesu

[pkaplan1 at comcast.net]

In the past week I have encountered an odd problem when my password is required on kubuntu 7.10.

About 20% of the time I login, the system appears to hang for 20-30 seconds after I enter my password and before loading the window manager.  At other times, the window manager starts loading as soon as I hit the return key after entering my password.

Similarly, when I run an application using sudo (either from the CL or a gui) sometimes (maybe 50%?) the system waits 20-30 seconds before launching the app.  When it happens w/ sudo, it is unrelated to the times that the slow login occurs.  There's no obvious trace of a problem in the system log.

When this happens it's as if there is some process that is using all of CPU resources, but I can't find anything with a process monitor and the hard disk doesn't spin incessantly.

Has anyone else encountered this behavior?  Have you identified a fix?

Paul