Well, my little test this morning seems to have shed more light on the
culprit... my 'creeping' VM has grown from 22% CPU to 89% in only a 
couple hours of idle time.  The only thing I did to make this happen
was to use the Speaker class to 'say' something.

Hopefully when I get home from work tonight I'll have a chance to look
into it further.  My other test VM (using my serial-polling class with
the Speaker hooks removed) is cycling away at about 7% CPU, no problems.
Something Speaker does seems to be the culprit...I'm not certain yet if
it's a generic sound on linux problem, or if it's limited to Speaker.

(Usually I can't be bothered to have sound turned on at all....just lately
I've found Speaker to be quite useful to give me cues at certain intervals.)

> 
> I, on the other hand, tend to leave Linux Squeak's running for days on
> end, and haven't noticed anything like this.
> 
> That said, there are some strange things that take more CPU than others.
>  For example, for some reason #inform: popups really suck CPU.  But
> aside from that, nothing.
> 
> 
> 
> -Lex
>