gnome-panel crash + gnome lag

I have had a bit of a search on the Internet and cannot seem to identify my problem. Im running 64bit openSUSE 11.1 on a very high end machine (i7, 8gig ram, and a 1gig 9800 nvidia).

However after an update (not sure what the update was about) i have come to notice that gnome seems to be responding slowly, for instance if i scroll in nautilus, the screen will scroll but the scrollbar itself will be stuck. Other things like highlighting files, it will only actually highlight a few of them and not all that i have selected.

Additionally my gnome-panel keeps crashing, i can tell by the system monitors and my lifrea rss feed count.

I am unsure how to debug gnome-panel, when it crashes i just kill it, and it restarts not a problem.

Items that run in the notification area of my gnome-panel.

  • Gnome-do
  • Exaile
  • Xchat
  • Pidgin
  • Remote Desktop
  • Compiz
  • Tasque
  • Liferea

i have the latest (not beta) nvidia driver, plus have ensured everything is up too date. Can anyone give me some ideas on how to debug / solve this problem.

Thank you in advance.