cron, and windowserver i know. cron is a scheduler, which runs programs...on a schedule. windowserver manages all the open cocoa programs & windows and everything. W is a bit more vexing. i looked up the W program, and more strangely, there is a miniscule w program (i couldn't find anything about 'W'; capitalization doesn't matter on most macosx things, but sometimes it does on the lowerlevel stuff). 'w' lists the current users, and idle times and stuff. and it reads it from a file /var/run/utmp. so, some program is probably calling w, to check on what users are connected, every so often.
i have an idea of how we can investigate this, but its a bit dirty. and i must warn you before we try. if you don't make a backup, and replace it after we're finished with the test, bad things might happen. be prepared for some down and dirtiness. what i propose you try to do is move 'w' out of the way, and hopefully whatever program that is trying to use it will give somekind of useable error message. then you can see who is using it and we can decide what to do with that program. note: in trying this, we may break unrelatd programs. don't be overly alarmed, we'll replace everything when we're done.
so here's what you can do: open up terminal (from /Applications/Utilities). and run this command:
sudo mv /usr/bin/w /usr/bin/w.OUTOFTHEWAY
(you should copy and paste the above, to make sure you get it exact)
now, if another program tries to call 'w', it will not be able to find it. with any luck, the calling program will spit an error message somewhere. try leaving the computer alone for a few minutes/hours, see if the hd spins down, and more importantly make note of any popup errors that come along. an error might also be put in the console (i forget where those logs are saved, but the console app i think is in /Applications/Utilties too). report back any new errors or relevant console logs.
to fix 'w', do the following in terminal:
sudo mv /usr/bin/w.OUTOFTHEWAY /usr/bin/w
(again, c+p the above to get it exact)
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