Strange application lockups

[Emmett Culley]

Sometime after the first or second update to Fedora 17 I started noticing that Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome and Gkrellm would stop updating their screens.

It starts off slowly, in that first I notice one of the above apps doesn't paint immediately after switching to the desktop where that app is running.  Then as time goes by it takes longer and longer for those app's to paint.  Note that even after they get painted they aren't immediately interactive either.

If I switch to a virtual terminal and run top, I see that each of these apps are at 100%, plus I notice that if I look at the virtual terminal as soon as I switch desktops to a non responsive app I see the abrt-applet is also at 100%.

Except for abrt-applet, once I see one of these apps hit 100%, they never decrease until I kill them.

If kill one of the apps and restart it, the apps works again for a while.

My system is running KDE and is fully updated (30 minutes ago) via the default repositories.

Is any body else seeing this?

Emmett