anarchy not responding

this post is strictly a geek rant, so if you don't know what ssh, x11, or linux is, you probably don't want to keep reading.

my desktop is not responding.
it's been 3days of me trying to get in, to figure out what's broken. my yahoo mail account is almost full and if i don't get in and run kmail soon, yahoo will likely start bouncing emails.

so what's wrong?
essentially the box is up and running, but the cpu load is at 4 and has been there for an unknown number of days. something (i'm thinking it's arts from kde 3.2-beta2) has run away with my cpu. linux is nifty there friends, but stay the hell away from that beta stuff. of course any number of other processes might have blown up, but without a working shell, i can't really speculate.

however, it would seem that the gods were indeed smiling last night (or maybe just taunting and laughing) 'cause after repeated login attempts, i actually got in. see, it basically lets me login, then waits..... forever. then dies with "connection closed by ". but this one time, it actually let me in. slowly going through each stage of the login until i finally got my prompt (this is where i saw the cpuload). so what did i do? diagnosing the problem seemed somewhat improbable, since just typing "su" took about 10min. so i just put in the following:

su
[password]
reboot

i got the "this system is going down now!" bit and got kicked out. yay! i thought, now my box will work again! but it would seem that the box never actually rebooted 'cause my continuous pings never dropped a single packet.... i'm trying something similar now and if i get in again i'll let you know if it works. otherwise, i'll be doing this half-awake when i get home in a few days.