'swapon -s' shows used: 0. Even when thrashing!

[Seth Delackner]

This is a stock potato 2.2.19 kernel from my initial installation of
debian about 2 days ago.  In the logs it definitly shows "Adding
Swap:..." and no errors.  'free' and 'swapon -s' show that I have 64
megs of swap space on my swap partition that are completely empty.  So
why does it refuse to use the swap even when main memory is choking on
many apps, most of them sleeping?