Comment 57 for bug 762918

FWIW: Sean Fenton's advice about disabling sync_to_vblank in gconf-editor seems to have done the trick: I just left my laptop on overnight with Transmission running (which was a recipe to activate the bug) and it came back no problem.

The key location is:

/apps/compiz-1/plugins/opengl/screen0/options/sync_to_vblank

(since there are a couple of keys with the same name).

I still fervently hope that this bug gets fixed soon, however.