I see this issue on my system as well. The way I deal with it when I'm running on battery is to attach to it using gdb. From there, I can just break and have it not resume. This, of course, means that I lose my panel functionality, though.
I will remove /etc/xdg/menus/debian-menu.menu, but I'd like to voice my agreement that removing the file is NOT an appropriate solution to this bug. gnome-panel should be robust enough to deal with any such input without causing the kind of nastiness manifested in this bug. Even if menu-xdg is not installed by default, I should be able to install it (for no particular reason, perhaps just because I want to break gnome- panel!) without having this problem crop up again. -- gnome-panel eats 50% cpu for half an hour and flickers https://launchpad.net/bugs/52405 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs