Emacs hangs - kind of

[Stephen Eilert]

Hi,

In my home machine (Ubuntu Feisty), Emacs is behaving... strangely.
While it works fine when I'm interacting with it, it appears not to
get CPU time when I'm not controlling it directly (maybe that's not an
accurate description, see below).

Since it does not happen when I'm typing, issuing commands and so
forth, I didn't notice at first. Screen redraws are not affected - X11
sense. However, shells, IRC sessions and whatever else might be
running sometimes do not update. This appears to be causing ERC to
drop connections too. If I try to play songs using EMMS, they will
play fine, until the song finishes. Then, I have to switch to the
Emacs window (and no, it's not suspended in a text terminal, that's
under X) for it to "wake up" again.

Google wasn't very helpful, then again, I don't know how to search for
this problem. Anyone's got a clue about what might be causing it, or
how I could I better diagnose the problem?