Comment 3 for bug 448086

This was interesting.
I just had this problem and collected the output from ps afx to report here. In addition to the processes shown in the attached file, things like dpkg and defoma-app were popping up with high CPU load when I looked at top, and the general system load was very high (firefox had constant microfreezes and the menus reacted slowly), all while update-manager was still showing "waiting for other tasks".

Then the X server disappeared. When gdm came up again, its design was shot (everything was too large) and told me that the gnome power saving applet isn't installed correctly. Then everything froze completely.

I power cycled now, and the problem with gdm and the gnome power manager applet still exist. Not sure that it's all related to the problem in this report but the system never behaved like that until now. I'll gather some additional logs.

My system is an Eee PC 901, and I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 (last update was 1-2 days ago) from an SDHC card. Installed memory is 2GiB.