Fan Running out of control

[mreed2011]

Hi,
My fan has been running like crazy for the last several days. I went in to activity monitor to see the CPU % usage, and there were a couple programs in there eating it all up, so I quit them. The problem resolved but is now back with a vengance. When I went back to activity monitor there was minimal total CPU usage listed, so I went to Terminal and did "top -u -s3" and there is one process taking up 99.8% of the CPU. It's PID is 4695, command is lsof. Any suggestions on what I can do to stop this, and is this a process that is dangerous to kill?
Thanks in advance for anyone who can help me with this!

mreed2011

 

[bobtomay]

It's a list open files unix command.
Should not be a negative side effect to quitting it, besides the individual app that's using it.

Installed a new widget in Dashboard recently? Try quitting them all and add back one at a time to see which might be the culprit.