Comment 35 for bug 365187

So, investigated remote family member's computer running 11.04 after complaints of slowness, overheating and shutdown.
One of the two accounts had indicator-applet-appmenu taking 100% of CPU seconds after starting, even after being killed.
I had tried comment #34 since they weren't using -me anyway, without success.
lsof revealed a log file in .cache that was filled with complaints about an instance already existing (regrettably I did not note down the precise message).

A panel reset:
gconftool-2 --shutdown
gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel
rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel
pkill gnome-panel

Appears to have solved things. Not clear exactly how it was screwed up, however