Persisting troubles with periodic stalls every few minutes

[Bartosz Fabianowski]

> top -qbSs 1 -d max > /var/tmp/somefile

Thank you, that helped. Although top did not tell me which process was 
guilty directly, it allowed me to track it down. For the record:

The process hogging the entire CPU was Xorg, which in turn was being 
pushed by the KDE World Clock. At my screen resolution, the clock 
redraws itself every 45 minutes. Apparently, it does this in a very 
inefficient way, using a lot of CPU and making heavy use of the disk 
drive. I have filed a bug report on this with KDE:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97565

Thanks Gavin and Kris for your input,
- Bartosz