How to clear CPU congestion?

[Josef Lowder]

.
I asked this question a while ago and never did get a solution, 
so thought I would try again.  My system normally runs with a 
very small number appearing for "X" under %CPU ... but sometimes 
something happenss that causes it to jump to a high number (as 
shown below) and the only way I have found to clear it is to 
reboot.  Then it runs fine for quite a while until the same 
problem occurs again.  Surely there must be some way to clear out 
whatever is causing this log jam other than reboot. 

Any suggestions? 

top - 11:12:12 up 7 days,  2:14,  5 users,  load average: 1.01, 1.07, 1.08
Tasks:  82 total,   2 running,  80 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 56.3% us, 11.6% sy,  5.9% ni, 25.9% id,  0.1% wa,  0.2% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    515484k total,   417720k used,    97764k free,    11952k buffers
Swap:  2096440k total,     2696k used,  2093744k free,   244728k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 3364 root      25   0 48356  38m 4732 R 97.2  7.6   6673:44 X
    1 root      16   0  1564  540  472 S  0.0  0.1   0:02.50 init
    2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
    3 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:02.82 events/0
    4 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 khelper
    5 root      18  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
    7 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
   81 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.11 kblockd/0
  113 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.62 pdflush
  114 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.34 pdflush
  116 root      19  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
  115 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:03.71 kswapd0
  704 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 kseriod