kapm-idled eats cpu and won't die

Greetings all, I just did a clean install of 7.1 on my amd k6-2 266 desktop, keeping my /home partition from 7.0. Kde 2 looks good except I noticed things were sluggish compared to 7.0. When I did a top I noticed that process kapm-idled was sucking up the cpu to the tune of 60 to 90%. I discovered this was power management which I don't care about, so I tried to kill -9 it but the thing won't die. I could not find anything on the suse site and hardly anything on deja.com. Anyone noticed this problem? Anyone fixed it or have ideas? Thanks, Steve.