One of many problems.

[gschaefr at comcast.net]

Help!

I don't know where to report this, so maybe someone here can help.

I've been using Ubuntu for over 1.5 years. I'm running 7.10 on this PC,
a P3/500 with 256 MB RAM. I have not installed 3 of the updates, as
when I did install them, on my primary disk, and was told to restart,
my system would not boot up, so I changed to a backup disk, and have
kept up with all updates since the February boot-failure, except those 3.

MY PROBLEM: A few weeks ago - maybe as many as 3 - I started noticing
a problem when I was reading BBC News from Firefox. My PC would get
very unresponsive, the disk light would come on, and I could hear lots
of disk activity. Usually I have to use an app in my menu panel to kill the
Firefox session, as nothing else works. All resources are being hogged.

When I run System Monitor, it shows 99 percent CPU use, 90 percent
RAM use, and my 3 GB swap RAM usage gradually climbs to 90 percent,
after watching it for 5 minutes or so. When I look at processes, the only
process using resources besides the System Monitor itself is "gnash",
which is using all remaining CPU. My question is, what is "gnash"? And
what does it do for (TO?) me? When I look behind the main Firefox
window, there is some kind of player running in a small window behind.
It seems to be related to delivering video from BBC News, but no video
ever displays in the main window, or anywhere else. What's going on?

Any help will be appreciated.

Jerry