Accumulating swap over time

[Douglas Phillipson]

Running FC4 kernel 2.6.14-1.1653_FC4smp.  I seem to accumulate a large 
amount of swap over time.  (A few days.  I'm not running any unusual 
apps.  My memory stastics (xosview) says I have gobs of free memory but 
after a while, even with a gig or more of free RAM my swap goes up to 
several hundred megabytes and things slow way down.  The disk swaps 
madly and then backs off for a while.  It seems to be cyclic in nature 
but the swap never goes away until a reboot.  At all times I have in 
excess of a gig of free RAM.  The only apps I'm running are Firefox, 
Thunderbird, openoffice 2.0, perhaps a music player on this machine 
under KDE 3.5.0.

Thanks
Doug P