timing issues with Ximian Desktop 2 and kernel 2.6.x

XD2-latest, 2.6.1-rc3 as of now, RH9 as base distro; also using
synaptics_drv.o from the 0.12.2 tarball, Radeon 7500 card.

The startup sequence of XD2 seems to hit a timing issue with 2.6.x
kernels so that the top panel's applet icons aren't displayed in the panel itself.
That however is a minor problem - the big one is that if I don't
go right-clicking the panel in some 10 seconds (which makes the icons appear, btw) my CPU usage goes to 100% with these in 'top':

64 processes: 62 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped

CPU states:  67.9% user  32.0% system   0.0% nice   0.0% iowait   0.0% idle
Mem:  1033892k av,  207756k used,  826136k free,       0k shrd,   15052k buff
       128844k active,              47412k inactive

Swap: 514040k av, 0k used, 514040k free 109240k cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
 2327 asuardi   25   0 15648 6428 14972 R    27.9  0.6   0:04   0 notification-ar
 2271 root      15   0 63732  15M 51256 S    25.1  1.5   0:04   0 X
 2320 asuardi   15   0 15300 5236 14848 S    23.7  0.5   0:03   0 pam-panel-icon
 2313 asuardi   15   0 19696  11M 16988 S    21.5  1.1   0:03   0 gnome-panel
 2258 root      17   0  3932 1064  3788 R     0.9  0.1   0:00   0 top
 2322 asuardi   15   0 15588 6512 14916 S     0.1  0.6   0:00   0 gnome-cups-mana
    1 root      16   0  1380  480  1344 S     0.0  0.0   0:07   0 init
    2 root      34  19     0    0     0 SWN   0.0  0.0   0:00   0 ksoftirqd/0
    3 root       5 -10     0    0     0 SW<   0.0  0.0   0:00   0 events/0
    4 root       5 -10     0    0     0 SW<   0.0  0.0   0:00   0 kblockd/0
    5 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   0 khubd
    6 root      25   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   0 pdflush

[NB: the first process is notification-area-applet]

and the desktop is only partially usable (it is still possible to have the root window menu activated, but nothing else apparently).

Eventually this leads to a stage where you can only Ctrl-Alt-Bksp
out of X (or Alt-Fn to a console and kill the spinning processes).

If instead I'm not too slow and I prod the panel with a right-click
on it, nothing of this happens and the desktop is as happy as with a 2.4.x kernel under the hood.

Since this is 100% reproducable and very easily, I'm available for
testing and providing further info.

Thanks in advance, ciao,

--alessandro

"Immagina intensamente e vedrai
dove gli altri pensano che non ci sia niente"
(Cristina Dona', "Salti nell'aria")