Comment 45 for bug 359653

I've just experienced this exact problem on Lucid.

kern.log has eg.:
Aug 27 00:54:50 carrell kernel: [10790.032494] BUG: soft lockup - CPU#2 stuck for 61s! [tomboy:11040]

uname -a:
Linux carrell 2.6.32-24-generic #41-Ubuntu SMP Thu Aug 19 01:38:40 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I upgraded from Karmic a few days ago, and the kernel on that was rock solid, this only started happening now.
There's also been some system freezes (not sure if it's just X or the entire kernel).