On my desktop:
Pentium 4 HT 3.02 Ghz
1 GB RAM
SiS chipset
Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti graphics card
The system time runs twice as fast as normal running the Fedora Core 4 SMP kernel and Hyper-threading support on (2 seconds system time = 1 second real time). The problem goes away if I turn HT off and go to non-SMP kernel ... but it runs 20-40% slower than with HT on and SMP, so I leave HT on and use SMP. It doesn't bother me too much, with a few exceptions such as the delay times are all 1/2 as long as they should be so if I hold a key down for just a bit too long it'll quickly fill the page with that character, and hotkeys are problem like when I want a terminal it's hard to get just 1 terminal to pop up ... usually 10-20 pop up
Anyway ... I've posted this question in other places and it looks like it happens on other distros as well ... like Ubuntu and Suse and others, and that there is no real solution ... it just a kernel bug. I hope this is not the case
I don't have access to my desktop right now ... it's at my other house ... so I can't try out things to see if they work, but as soon as I get access I'll try to implement the solutions ... maybe I could set up some remote desktop stuff.