Constant high cpu usage

[Keith Clark]

I have an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor with 4 GB of RAM running Ubuntu
9.04 and my CPU usage is consistently close to 100%.  I've tried turning
off Compiz, but that makes no difference.

Here is a capture of TOP:

top - 16:51:47 up 2 days, 21:52,  2 users,  load average: 7.05, 3.34,
1.57
Tasks: 210 total,   6 running, 204 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 62.7%us, 35.7%sy,  1.7%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,
0.0%st
Mem:   3931056k total,  3317952k used,   613104k free,   234928k buffers
Swap: 11687248k total,        0k used, 11687248k free,  2414984k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+
COMMAND            
10389 root      20   0  328m  34m  12m S  9.0  0.9   0:27.80
Xorg               
11780 keithcla  20   0 25580 5120  660 S  5.0  0.1   0:09.22
dbus-daemon        
11720 keithcla  20   0  169m 8284 6160 R  3.3  0.2   0:06.49
x-session-manag    
11789 keithcla  20   0 47476 7264 2340 S  3.0  0.2   0:05.69
gconfd-2           
11816 keithcla  20   0  220m  11m 7372 S  2.3  0.3   0:02.93
gnome-settings-    
12611 keithcla  39  19 59280  33m 3068 R  1.7  0.9   0:01.89
apt-check          
11838 keithcla  20   0  211m  18m 9044 S  1.3  0.5   0:01.86
python             
11834 keithcla  20   0  139m  11m 5392 S  1.0  0.3   0:00.62
trackerd           
11927 keithcla  20   0  208m  10m 8216 S  1.0  0.3   0:01.91
indicator-apple    
13069 keithcla  20   0  243m  33m 9048 S  1.0  0.9   0:02.78
compiz.real        
14968 keithcla  20   0     0    0    0 R  1.0  0.0   0:00.03
vino-server        
 6116 chipcard  20   0 27588 1528  836 S  0.7  0.0  41:54.61
chipcardd4         
12100 keithcla  20   0  258m  17m  10m S  0.7  0.5   0:00.88
empathy            
12124 keithcla  20   0  158m 3120 1520 S  0.7  0.1   0:01.88
gnome-screensav    
 2771 boinc     20   0 73272 5036 2072 S  0.3  0.1  10:01.60
boinc              
11803 keithcla  20   0 40856 2356 1932 S  0.3  0.1   0:00.32
gvfsd              
11825 keithcla  20   0  335m  25m  15m S  0.3  0.7   0:03.11
gnome-panel        
11845 keithcla  20   0  143m 9116 6848 S  0.3  0.2   0:00.49
notify-osd         
11859 keithcla  20   0  335m  14m  10m S  0.3  0.4   0:00.51
evolution-alarm    
11860 keithcla  20   0  199m  16m  10m R  0.3  0.4   0:01.01
gnome-terminal     
11861 keithcla  20   0  162m 8120 6388 S  0.3  0.2   0:00.44
tracker-applet     
11863 keithcla  39  19  149m  12m 5392 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.70
tracker-indexer    
11868 keithcla  20   0  246m  30m  10m S  0.3  0.8   0:01.30
ubuntuone-clien    
11918 keithcla  20   0  205m 9900 7800 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.25
multiload-apple    
12105 keithcla  20   0 51316 3684 2996 S  0.3  0.1   0:00.46
mission-control    
14969 keithcla  20   0  191m 6224 4784 R  0.3  0.2   0:00.01
vino-server        
    1 root      20   0  5240 1792  380 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.72
init               

When I am logged out of the machine, I can log in via SSH and run TOP
and my system just idles along fine with little CPU usage.  It is only
when I'm logged into the system directly.  Xorg and dbus-daemon are
always the top two processes in order or CPU usage.

I'm not sure where to begin troubleshooting this issue.

Keith