CPU hog causes KDE System Guard to open too late.

[Anton Rolls]

Hi all,

I have a (minor) situation occurring today where
Thunderbird checks mail and seems to have trouble
communicating with the email server.
(This is an intermittent problem and may be
  caused by the server, I don't know yet.)

While it is waiting for a timeout, cpu utilization
goes high.

The first thing I want to do when this happens is
open KDE System Guard with Ctrl+Esc as I usually
do, however, with Thunderbird hogging CPU like that
it takes an unusually long time to open.
By the time it opens, there's a good chance that
the timeout has occurred and cpu use is back to
normal.

That seems like a failure of the user interface
to serve my interests (which include running
software which might have bugs).

Is there a way to raise the priority of the user
interface or of KDE System Guard so that launching
it is not held up by any cpu-hogging app ?

Regards,

Anton.