Debian :: Suddenly High IO From Random Processes?

I try to open an application, and it's painfully slow, and i think "this is weird i've had it open just 10 seconds ago and it should be in the cache". the disk is constantly working, so maybe i ran out of ram and it's swapping, so i check: according to 'free -m', about 200m of 2g ram is used (without buffers/cache), but still also 200m of swap is used, although swappiness is set to 1 (low tendency to swap). so this is not normal.also, kswapd0 is eating pretty much cpu (but not 100%). switching to tty1, logging in, and starting iotop takes about a minute. according to iotop, about 8 random processes (could be a browser, could be some daemon) have 99% IO activity (i'm not sure what that means, how can 8 processes take 99% each?).after the first 3 times, i disabled swap by adding swapoff -a to rc.local, but it's still the same, and kswapd is still among the cpu-eaters.