Swap Usage with Kernel 2.4.14

[war]

Regular usage on my box, launching netscape, opera, pan, xchat, gaim;
the kernel eventually digs into swap.

However, the swap is never released?

Mem:   900596K av,  185896K used,  714700K free,       0K shrd,    4172K
buff
Swap: 2048276K av,   63728K used, 1984548K free                   91176K
cached

Are there any settings I should have set or be aware of?

I current use 4GB support, 1GB of ram, 2GB of swap.

Having 1GB, I thought I had enough memory for basic operations without
the disk swapping like mad.