Why is intr taking up so much cpu?

This is happening after I open a flash video in firefox and watch it for 
> 15 minutes:

root   20 -80    -     0K   160K WAIT    0   3:38 14.08% intr

After this happens, my system goes into a death spiral and I have to 
shut it down.

vmstat -i
interrupt                          total       rate
irq1: atkbd0                       10384          0
irq9: acpi0                            5          0
irq14: ata0                       153410          7
irq15: ata1                           58          0
irq17: wpi0                       534038         27
irq20: hpet0 uhci0+              2496833        129
irq22: uhci2                       66485          3
cpu0:timer                      19238037        999
irq256: hdac0                     189713          9
cpu1:timer                      19236431        999
Total                           41925394       2178


Any suggestions?  current (r210135), i386 smp. Dell C2D laptop.


Doug

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