Comment 1 for bug 61250

update on this:

updated via apt-get to edgy knot 3, now using kernel 2.6.17-9-386. I figured if I had a broken dapper that could not be fixed then possibly having a bleeding edgy on a running laptop would be a step up.

Unfortunately this hasn't fixed the problem. xorg is still having shooting up and sitting at 99.9% CPU and needs to be restarted remotely. The symptoms are mouse cursor working and multicolored 1px lines through the screen or completely messed up screen.
Can sometimes log into KDE but opening any app will cause xorg to hit 99.9% CPU

op - 23:01:01 up 2 min, 3 users, load average: 1.08, 0.62, 0.25
Tasks: 85 total, 3 running, 82 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 99.7%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 515780k total, 212032k used, 303748k free, 9472k buffers
Swap: 1510068k total, 0k used, 1510068k free, 124524k cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 3917 root 25 0 96364 11m 2928 R 99.9 2.3 1:36.08 Xorg
    1 root 16 0 1632 532 444 S 0.0 0.1 0:01.38 init

running an strace on the process id show that X is doing the following :

sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])

ad nauseam....

Doing a google shows that some other people are finding a similar problem and there doesn't seem to be a fix, some people say yes this fixes it, other people say that fix doesn't work on my box.
Notably this massive thread at
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=31858&page=27&pp=15

I am running the nv drivers, not the nvidia binary drivers and do not have the nvidia-kernel-common package installed. I stripped the system back to just nv in the hope that would fix.

other items in xorg.conf:

not loading glx
renderaccel is false / off

So hopefully someone can have a look at this and see what is happening....