After upgrading from 6.1 to 6.2 on the alpha, the cdplayer_applet started taking over about 90% of CPU time whenever it was open, even when it was not playing a CD or doing anything else of use. .. The only option I found was to kill it and run something like xplaycd instead.
I believe this is now updated and should work. Try updating from ftp://rawhide.redhat.com/redhat/linux/rawhide/alpha/RedHat/RPMS/ (*2.4.3-7*) Cheers Phil =--=