Why should starting synaptec peg system resources?

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Running wheezy on P4 intel cpu 3.06 Ghz  2gb ram
kde desktop

I rarely have ran the gui tool synaptic and normally do things with
`aptitude'.

I haven't noticed any particular system sloth.  Nothing unusual
anyway.

I happened to be looking at the openoffice.org wiki and started to
follow the instructions there about configuring the repositories.

  http://wiki.debian.org/OpenOffice

It says early on you need to `aptitude install openoffice.org'
But of course that doesn't really install anything that lands in
../bin.  So nothing you can do .. yet.  Not sure why that is not
remarked on there since one would think you would then be able to
run openoffice... but no.

Then moving on to the part about configuring for repos.

-------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      -------- 
  1.  Open Synaptic (Applications -> System Tools -> Synaptic Package
      Manager in GNOME)

  2. Click the Settings Menu, and choose Repositories.

  3. Configure!
-------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      -------- 

I'm not running anything heavy like databases or such.

However, if I start synaptic it immediately pegs resources (as viewed
in `top') around 92-95 percent us.. And there it stays until I close the
partially open synaptic gui.

At that point the `top' reading drops to 92-95 percent id.

Surely this is quite abnormal... where would I look to start
debugging?