So I'm not exactly sure if this is a bug in an upstream (as it has appeared when copying any amount and size of files on just about any distro I've tried), low-level program, a bug in KDE (as it only ever seems to appear on KDE specifically), or just configuration issues on my end. But....

a process is spawned called "file.so" and seems to eat through my resources, negatively impacting just about everything. I take it this isn't normal behavior? I previously thought it might be in relation to fuse-exfat, but when I went to copy a good amount of files to a newly formatted ext4 drive, the same issue cropped up (file.so prcess eating a good portion of my system resources). If this IS a bug, I'll be glad to put it in the bug tracker.

I get the feeling I'm not the only one who has encountered this.

I also encountered this problem.
I don't know how to tackle this. The top command only shows the program name as "file.so" which is vague.

Hi, did you try to disable baloo under system settings->search-> configuration and disable archive search (the application is called baloo)

Hope it help