gnome-panel lag?

["Simon Hill" <red_one othersdietrying com>]

i've got helix (ximian?) -gnome installed, debian unstable, xfree86 4.02,
kernel 2.4.1
sometimes when i click the items in the 

the task-list panel works fine, but the buttons on the panel, including the
"start" button (the launchers) sometimes take ages (up to a minute!) to respond
to the click...
sometimes when i have a menu open and it "lags", all input stalls and i can't
do anything until it "unlags".
note the desktop icons work fine, thank god i have an Eterm icon on the desktop
:P
i've had this problem ever since i installed this copy of debian about 4 months
ago...

my sources.list is as follows:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib
non-free
deb http://spidermonkey.helixcode.com/distributions/debian unstable main 
deb http://galeon.euber.net/galeon/ sid/


anyone had this problem? heard of it? solutions?
nb: removing ~/.gnome and others doesn't fix the problem.

also, my mate has very similar (helix-gnome etc) setup, and doesn't suffer
these problems.