help!

[ToTheCenter.com]

Wow, how's that for a vague title.

Here's the situation, our server is crashing lately once a week.
Purely for fun i decided to stop anything related to mail:
 1057   /etc/rc.d/init.d/MailScanner stop
 1058   /etc/init.d/sendmail stop
 1059   service spamassassin stop


Then I ran the TOP command again. The server load dropped from 5-10 
where it was:
load average: 5.88, 7.23, 8.05

Dropped down to under 1

Thoughts?

Please email me back directly so I can get the response quicker