screen brightness change freezes laptop (kpowersave/haldaemon)

[Konstantin Svist]

Hi all,

I have a problem that seems to be related to haldaemon:
whenever I change the screen brightness of my laptop (Dell Inspiron 
E1505), everything freezes for a second and then continues as normal. 
There's no spike in the cpu monitor, and the clock applet seems to 
display the right time (no time skips) -- but during the freeze it's all 
frozen: keyboard, mouse, clock applet, cpu usage applet. If an audio or 
video clip was playing at the moment, it would freeze as well (and then 
continue as normal after 1 sec)

The problem goes away if I either (a) stop haldaemon service, or (b) 
quit kpowersave before playing with brightness. Normal behavior is 
restored in either case, then.

What's going on?