unresponsive applications -- they turn gray

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

1. Ubuntu release Gutsy Gibbon 7.10.

2. don't know what this is. GNOME Desktop 2.20.1. Synaptic 0.60ubuntu5?

3. I was playing Gnometris when the application became gray and unresponsive. No other application was open. After Gnometris stopped working--I didn't close it--I looked at the System Monitor. CPU 1 and 2 were 90% and 70%. User memory was 40.7%. It says I have 503.4MB.

This problem (unresponsive gray application) occurs quite frequently with Firefox usually on graphics heavy sites. If too many tabs are open, say 4, the sites don't have to be graphics heavy for Firefox to slow to a crawl and turn gray. When typing, say in the search box on Google, the letters appear about 1 per second.

I have Windows XP installed on the same machine, and it runs with no problem. Firefox works just fine on it.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Feb 17 00:17:35 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-panel
Package: gnome-panel 1:2.20.1-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcCmdline: gnome-panel --sm-client-id default1
ProcCwd: /home/dmitry
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-panel
Uname: Linux dmitry 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 07:42:25 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux