I have speedfan, but the temps are not causing a problem. The noise of the laptop fan speeding up is though!

All caused by this flash plugin's CPU usage - stupidly high - 50% for the "recently viewed" animated menu at the top of the youtube page. 60-70% for viewing one vid, spiking even higher at times!

Third party players use 0-1% CPU. Surely even flash, although cross platform, can't be that inefficient? If it is, that's an unacceptable waste of electricity and resources for simple tasks like moving around images!

I'm not sure if the Internet Explorer ActiveX plugin suffers from the same issue, probably not.

Thanks for checking your PC out Harrison. Very common problem according to Google. Some over at EAB have noticed it too.