Hi there,

Whenever I hover the cursor over icons in system tray or the "show hidden icons" arrow the GUI becomes sluggish and system monitor shows Xorg hogging the CPU.

I am running Kubuntu 11.10, and I have not changed any appearance settings. Is this a common issue? And what can I do to figure out more information?

Can you tell if these icons are using the "Legacy" XEmbed based system tray icons or if they are the newer SNI based system tray icons?

SNI based ones will usually glow when hovered, and show Plasma themed tooltips.

They are the SNI based ones. They do show a Plasma theme tooltip when hovered, but they do not glow.

Hmm, I haven't been able to reproduce. Can you try and narrow it down to see if the presence of a particular application is causing this?

Does the CPU usage of dbus-daemon, kded4 or other processes become elevated as well?

This is weird! I removed the icons one by one to see which exactly is doing this. Now, I have removed everything, even the taskbar itself, and I am left with a blank desktop.

When the cursor is in the lower right corner of the screen, whether on desktop or on any window, the same thing happens; GUI becomes sluggish, and Xorg occupies the CPU!

Which graphics driver does your system use? Did you remove the panel completely?

Yes, I removed the panel completely, there is nothing now but the wallpaper. I was using the driver that came with kubuntu and when I started noticing this I installed the ATI proprietary driver.

Could this be some transparent widget in this corner or something?

This quite possibly could be. Do you have any widgets in the area in question, or on other activities in that area of the screen? (This includes the Plasma Dashboard)

I did not add anything to this area, and there is nothing at all now on the desktop.

Is there a possible way to reset the desktop and restore default panels? I mean in case there is something transparent in there?

The cursors does not show, but it is in the lower right corner, close to where the clock would usually be.

http://i.imgur.com/dJKmP.png

Could you please enable the show painting KWin desktop effect and see if it indicates which area is being excessively repainted?

I believe it is the taskbar area.
http://i.imgur.com/SxaAV.png

Can you please try disabling effects such as Blur and Glow?

A very interesting thing happened. I am on a laptop but using an external monitor with the laptop monitor disabled. I enabled it and this issue is almost gone, the cursor becomes a little sluggish but it does not hang.

Also, disabling the effects does nothing for this issue.

Ok, does the Laptop screen have a panel on it by any chance? If it does, this is probably why it persists after removing the external screen's panel.

I would recommend filing a bug report about this behaviour. Please include a list of all applets in use in either the panels or any activities to assist the developers in tracking this.