I set up a new linode account, and started a slackware 13.37 image. The next day I noticed a load average of 1, with inetd and syslogd constantly in the run state. After googling a bit I found this post: http://henrysnotes.org/?p=824

I installed pidentd with slackpkg and my cpu usage dropped to 0. Please either install pidentd in the default slackware image, or disable auth in /etc/inetd.conf to prevent future users from running into this scenario.

Yep. I noticed the same thing just recently. The default install image should definitely have this package installed.