KDE Is Eating My CPU

[Robert Tilley <tilleyrw@cfl.rr.com>]

When other people responded to my posting concerning system usage, I knew it 
was a possible issue.  Specifically, it is the fact that gkrellm shows an 
average of 50% CPU usage when KDE is running, and about 3% when Blackbox is 
running which seems to indicate that something about XFree86 is sucking up 
system resources.

An examination of top shows:

PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
18412 root      16 -10  112M  52M 23096 S <  27.3 28.3  32:12 XFree86
18536 tilleyrw  11   0 10832   9M  8172 S     6.3  5.3   9:04 kdeinit
18630 tilleyrw   9   0 13696  12M 10992 S     4.8  6.7   0:17 kmail
18622 tilleyrw  11   0  8136 7660  4388 S     2.8  4.0   4:37 qtella
18516 tilleyrw   9   0  2788 2272  1992 S     2.1  1.1   1:16 gkrellm
27957 root      17   0  1028 1028   780 R     1.7  0.5   0:01 top
18613 tilleyrw   9   0 22868  16M 10948 S     0.9  8.9   1:44 kdeinit
18617 tilleyrw   9   0 27216  20M 10860 S     0.7 11.1   2:30 kdeinit
18614 tilleyrw   9   0  7868 7352  6956 S     0.1  3.8   0:02 kdeinit
18615 tilleyrw   9   0 22028  16M 10688 S     0.1  8.6   0:09 kdeinit
<SNIP>

This taken during a system lull.  I'm tired of having to kill processes to 
reduce a 99% system usage.  Could any other users recount their experiences 
with exhaustive system usage when running KDE?
-- 
Comments and information are appreciated.
Flames, rants, and other miscellany are routed to /dev/null.

Robert Tilley, tilleyrw@cfl.rr.com