The Dialing applet seems to have a similar effect. In the countless complaints that we've received, this has always been described as a StarTap problem. For that, you have to use the Threads button from Performance Monitor's main screen. Each thread is a single sequence of execution, and is really very similar to what we think of as a program. It starts, it does a sequence of things in some particular order, and sooner or later it stops.
Most application programs use just a single thread.
The times that are shown are the total amount of computer time that each thread has consumed since the last soft reset. This means that you'll have to do a little arithmetic to figure out how much time a thread has consumed since the last time you looked at it. After a Storm, you'll find that after your machine has been unresponsive for 20 seconds, that the time shown for filesys.exe has increased by about 20 seconds. In the popular models of PPCs, the Casios seem to be the only units that suffer from these Storms. For example, although the Compaq doesn't have the horsepower that the Casio has, it doesn't spend anywhere near as much time doing filesys housekeeping.