This is a bug I reported in an e-mail to bugs@redhat on 1/10/99. For clarification I have found that when you log in as root and then leave root to log in as a regular user you get a tremendous slowdown. Found the problem that control palnel is still running in top and consuming 98% of cpu and about 15% of memory... I have tried killing control panel, and closing it before restarting to no avail. The only way to get rid of it is to su root and kill pid. system info: packard bell 110cdt orginally pentium 90 now running evergreen 200mmx 40 megs memory(edo) 256 cache. can't tell you particulars on chipset untill next time i crack the case...
IIRC, this is a gtk+ bug, and it's been fixed in the latest gtk+ development releases.