autovacuum running for a long time on a new table with 1 row

Running 9.1.3 on Linux-x86_64.  I'm seeing autovacuum running for the
past 6 hours on a newly created table that only has 1 row of data in
it.  This table did exist previously, but was dropped & recreated.
I'm not sure if that might explain this behavior.  When I strace the
autovacuum process, I see the following scrolling by non-stop (with no
changes to the file referenced):
select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 21000}) = 0 (Timeout)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 21000}) = 0 (Timeout)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("base/16412/214803_vm", O_RDWR)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

Is this normal/expected?

thanks