100% CPU Usage for Coin Generation?

[venom]

Hello.. I was wondering if you guys knew if having your CPU running at 100% usage while generating coins is normal?  On an older Pentium M 1.7ghz w/ 1gb ram... also on a newer Core 2 Duo, 2.2Ghz w/ 2gbs of ram... I thought that the software is only supposed to use idle time?

[laszlo]

The software doesn't know anything about idle time, but it changes the generating thread's priority to be low.  This should cause the operating system to schedule it whenever a higher priority item is pending.  The result is that when your computer is idle, in between higher priority processing becoming runnable, bitcoin becomes runnable and so all the CPUs are always at 100%.

[asdfman]

100% cpu usage isn't necessarily a bad thing, I believe there might be a bug with bitcoind when it changes the process priorities during coin generation..

these threads might help:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=285.0
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=72.0