I agree with u. This is very obvious when i was using RedHat 8 till Fedora Core 1 now. But it's ok, if u have sufficient RAM that is 128 and above. 256MB and above will do just fine.
But in ur case that's something very wrong. Can u share with us on
1. How much allocate ur swap partition?
2. How large is ur harddisk size, wat's the file system?
3. Wat are the services u started.
4. How much u shared for ur video memory?