I have here a c3700 with a fresh install of HPUX 11.11 (from CDs dated
September, 2005) with various patches installed in order to run CATIA V5.
When completely idle, the load average hovers around 2-5.

Running "top" shows the following top processes:

TTY PID USERNAME PRI NI SIZE RES STATE TIME %WCPU %CPU COMMAND
? 31 root 152 20 0K 1088K run 0:00 0.10 0.10 vxfsd
? 1643 root 152 20 3924K 6280K run 0:03 0.08 0.08 cimserver
pts/ta 4676 root 178 20 5140K 724K run 0:00 0.32 0.08 top

There is also disk activity every second or two. fsck doesn't report any
errors, however.

My first inclination is that the disk is going bad, but I'm much more familiar
with Suns than HPs, and am hoping that it's just something silly that I have
overlooked.

Thanks.

Unix is never idle 8-)

Stop CATIA and see if the problem goes away. Then call them.

The Load Avg is the number of processes that are in the ready to run
queue when a context switch occurs, if I remember correctly. Processes
that busy loop, but do not do much, are almost always ready to run, and
can appear to make the load avg high. If CPU usage is low, LA is not
itself anything to worry about in that case.

As for disks and other stuff...have you checked
/var/adm/syslog/syslog.log? If disk is going bad, maybe lvdisplay -v
will show you something. You can look at hardware also with xstm (or
the other stm component.