Comment 11 for bug 1008197

@ #10: You are definitely right. I also read that there are Mint versions different from cinnamon one involved. I also read that this kind of problems has been happening with previous versions of the distro, even with Mint 7, 8, 9. Yesterday my system gone crazy simple by opening a 400 kbyte svg image (Gnome image viewer was the selected application). Firefox opened the same image without problems, later I was able to open it with Gnome image viewer, it seems to be a random issue. Anyway, since it happens with previous versions, with Cinnamon and Mate, and Gnome2, and Compiz, clearly it is not bound to Cinnamon, nor gtk3, nor specific WM. Since it seems that it happens on Ubuntu too (I found something on 11.04), from what can be found in forums, the problem seems to be bound to graphical environment, e.g. X and/or graphic drivers, and/or to a kernel issue. For the record, I am running Mint 13 with a 3.4 kernel installed by gdebi from Ubuntu repositories. In one forum someone hypothesized that the issue can be bound to ondemand feature introduced in kernel 2.6.10 version. Have a look here, for example:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/stats/trans_table

http://wiki.debian.org/HowTo/CpuFrequencyScaling

let us know what you can find about.