Leaking at-spi-registryd

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

Not sure where this problem might lie, but I'm wondering if anyone else 
sees it?

Admittedly, my 1.5 GHz Celeron is showing its age, and probably isn't 
the best platform for Ubuntu, but I notice that after about a day of use 
my system is running so slow it is practically unusable. First I 
suspected firefox, so I killed and restarted it, but this regularly 
didn't solve the problem. Thunderbird was next, as were a number of 
other programs on my system. Killing and restarting caused an 
improvement, but things rapidly degraded to disk/swap thrashing and the 
need to reboot. It was when I started finger-pointing at pidgin that I 
finally fired up gnome-system-monitor...

...and discovered that at-spi-registryd was listed as using 189 MB of 
RAM. No, that isn't a typo.

I'm unfortunately not conversent enough with ps to sort all processes by 
memory use, and tools like top seem inaccessible unless I set a slow 
refresh rate so I can review the material presented, so I'm not sure if 
the problem is wider reaching than that. But I've done a bit of poking, 
and if the problem isn't wider-reaching, at-spi-registryd is probably a 
good starting point.

What I've noticed with periodic "ps auw |grep at-spi-registryd" checks 
is that at-spi-registryd hovers at around 0.6% memory use for a while. 
Then, at some point which I can't reliably reproduce other than by using 
my computer for a day or two, it starts slowing. Over the course of two 
cycles I've determined that this slowdown corresponds to a spike in the 
percentage of memory used by at-spi-registryd, and it usually jumps to 
7.something% and never drops below that point.

I tried checking out the latest at-spi-registryd from subversion. I use 
stow to keep all locally-installed stuff separate and removable from 
distribution-installed packages. I have 
/usr/local/libexec/at-spi/at-spi-registryd, but 
/usr/lib/at-spi/at-spi-registryd is still being started. How can I start 
my own locally installed at-spi-registryd without replacing the Ubuntu 
packaged version?

Until I figure this out, is there some way of stopping/restarting 
at-spi-registryd mid-session? I tried killing it, but after that point I 
was unable to get to a prompt where I could start a new instance. 
Generally I can tell that I'm at a terminal or in the run dialog because 
backspace on an empty line emits a beep, but nothing I did brought me to 
this point.

Finally, has anyone else seen this behavior? I don't understand enough 
of how the AT infrastructure works to know what might solve it. Is it an 
issue with at-spi-registryd leaking, or maybe something where some user 
of the registryd is flooding it with objects that it doesn't then 
dispose of? As stated, I can't seem to reliably reproduce this problem 
in any way other than maintaining an uptime of a day or two. Sometimes 
it is hastened by visiting an intensive website in firefox, something 
using lots of javascript and such, but it was just recently triggered 
and I'd not done anything of the sort. Were there any major leak issues 
resolved in newer at-spis? Is there anything else I might do to help 
resolve this and find what piece in the puzzle might be causing it?

BTW, this is on the latest Ubuntu Intrepid X86 with all upgrades applied 
and trunk Orca.

Thanks for your time.