APM Daemon in Mandrake

[Marr]

Fellow GLLUGers,

My brother-in-law is running Mandrake 8.0 and he had his PC over for some 
tweaking the other day.  At one point, I noticed that the CPU meter was 
pegged at around 100%.  A quick check showed that the 'kapm-idled' process 
was hogging the "lion's share" by far.

Assuming it was some sort of APM daemon, I tried to kill the process, but it 
seemed to either keep respawning or just didn't die.  I've forgotten, but I 
think the PID was unchanging, so I guess maybe it just wouldn't die.

Oddly enough, the CPU usage later (several minutes later, I think) dropped to 
normal (i.e. almost 0%) of it's own accord, with no explicable reason!  The 
'kapm-idled' had relinquished it's death grip, apparently.  :^)

Just tonight, I checked a log file output from a script that I had him run 
several days ago with lots of good info (like 'ps -aux').  I see from that 
log that the 'kapm-idled' process has been really hogging the CPU rather 
routinely!  Here's a little excerpt (much editted) from the 'ps -aux' output 
section:

USER    PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root      1  0.0  0.0  1356   76 ?        S    Dec12   0:04 init
root      2  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW   Dec12   0:00 [keventd]
root      3 25.9  0.0     0    0 ?        SW   Dec12 4121:14 [kapm-idled]
root      4  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW   Dec12   0:18 [kswapd]
root      5  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW   Dec12   0:00 [kreclaimd]
root  11235  0.4  0.9 86660 1160 ?        SL   Dec16  42:15 /etc/X11/X

Something seems clearly out of whack here.  This snapshot comes after just 
over 11 days of uptime.  Compare 'X' (2nd largest) usage with 'kapm-idled' 
usage.  On my (Slackware) system, APM is disabled, and 'X' and 'Emacs' (I 
'live' in Emacs ;^) ) are the top 2 "heavy time users", but nothing like 
'kapm-idled'!!!

Can anybody running Mandrake with APM enabled confirm/deny the fact that the 
'kapm-idled' process is hogging CPU?

Does anyone know why this might be happening?  I'm befuddled and I don't have 
Mandrake to test it out.

TIA....

P.S.  Many thanks to Paul Melson for his advice a few months back in getting 
the Mandrake GUI login back after it "broke".  This has mysteriously happened 
more than once on my bro-in-law's PC and Paul's advice was the perfect fix!

Bill Marr