CPU Usage 100%

I have been testing Zorin 5 on a couple computers and I am very happy with most everything except for Zorin too easily pegging CPU usage at or near 100%. One of the machines is a P4 2ghz 1gig Ram, and the other is an AMD Semptron 2.3ghz 2gig RAM.

I have seen several similar issues with Ubuntu and I was wondering if anyone might have suggestions for Zorin. I turned off most of the default eye candy, which helped quite a bit, but I still cannot multitask with more than two or three programs. In Top it appears that very little CPU is being used by any one process, but still the monitor frequently shows 35-65% while no program is running other than the monitor. At present Zorin is not usable on my PCs simply because of the programs running so slowly, which is a shame because I really like Zorin.

Would I have better success maybe trying Zorin 4?

I'm running Zorn 5 Ultmate, on a AMD Athlon 64 3800 processor with 1gb of Ram and a Nividia Geforce 6300 Turbocache 512 Mb. The only thing I have noticed is when I'm playing solitaire and I've been playing for a while the computer will freeze from a couple of seconds to maybe a minute then it frees up and runs normally. When I installed the Nividia driver I did have to down grade to the 173 driver. I do have all the eye candy and since I'm running the Mac OSX interface it works quite well.

Checking the cpu usage it has been running below 50% with a spike once in a while up to about 85%.

Newegg just had a memory sale so I have 4 gb on the way, I'm excited to see what that does to the system and how well Zorn responds.