I've read the other threads on maemo-launcher but none seem to fit my problem.

What I am seeing is my CPU load meter applet oscillate between 50% (4 bars) and 100% (2 bars) load when I am doing absolutely nothing. I have turned off all my desktop applets and it is still doing this oscillation. When I log in via ssh and use top, a maemo-launcher process sits pretty steady at 20-25% CPU and 40% memory. I would assume that is because it is averaging the load its polling time.

I have noticed that my battery doesn't last as long as it used to in quiescent mode so that might be an effect of it.

I suppose I could forcably kill that particular maemo-launcher and see what else dies but before I do that, I was curious if anyone was seeing the same things and figured out what was spazzing out.

Addendum: Well ... I did kill -9 that process and the whole desktop died and automatically restarted and now the load is somewhere where I'd expect it to be. So I am not sure if some core process gets itself worked up into a tizzy over time or if something specifically triggers it. I will keep an eye out I guess.

maemo-launcher could be any process launched through "maemo-launcher". maemo-launcher is there to accelerate process launching, but unfortunately, processes launched via maemo-launcher all appear as "maemo-launcher" in the tasklist.

Ya ... that is the unfortunate obfuscation that I am running into that is hindering my troubleshooting :[

I will just have to occasionally kill the offending launcher I guess until I can pin point what is getting launched that is going nuts.

mwiktowy, I'm having the exact same prob, and it's driving me nuts. As seems the case for you, the workaround at the moment is to reboot or kill maemo-launcher.

I haven't done much troubleshooting yet. When I get a moment, I may compile the GNU version of ps and pstree to see if I can find an offending program. I seem to recall that top will display CPU usage for the parent application, so perhaps it is a sub-process that is causing the problem.

I'm also snapshotting running processes (ps > running_procs.txt) to compare what's running when this behavior persists and when it doesn't.

I'm wondering if an offending application may be leaving a process running after exiting, something such as WIFI connection or media player.

I think this (the maemo-launcher process being called maemo-launcher) is fixed in Diablo; it seems that those processes now show up as the name of the app they launch. For modest and osso-xterm, at least, it seems there's a maemo-launcher and a maemo-invoker process, both with command-line "modest" or "osso-xterm"...