I have noticed this a couple of times, and was wondering if anyone else could confirm this:

Sometimes, for no apparent reason, hildon-status-menu gets stuck at 100% CPU and starts eating masses of memory (102MB in the last one I kill -9'd). The two times in the last couple of weeks I have confirmed this happening, my battery started warning much earlier than I would expect.

I have a conky running in the background all the time (usually not a problem), and could see that the CPU is 100% for all of Conky's CPU history graph.

Checking with Battery Eye, I can see that the battery level has been in free-fall for a couple of hours.

ps auxw | grep hildon-status-menu shows that one instance of it is over 100MB of memory.

sudo kill -9 <hildon-status-menu pid> resolves the problem, and CPU levels go back to normal. Unfortunately, the battery is flat by then (since I first notice the problem when the battery warning goes off).

I have too many apps installed to list, but the ones that show up in the status area are:

Simple Brightness Applet
OpenVPN Applet
3G/2G/Dual Mode Selection Applet

Standard applets I use are:
Clock&Alarms
Profile: General
Internet Connection (connected to WiFi)
Bluetooth (on and discoverable)
Available on Skype

Could anyone else confirm this? Checking Conky (installable from the app manager) whenever your battery runs low is an easy way of finding out if this is happening.

What 3rd party software is installed (especially Desktop Widgets)?

I have more apps installed than I can list by hand, including a few from -devel. I could do a dpkg list, but that also shows huge numbers of system packages. If you know a way of making a list of user installed apps, I would be glad to dump it here. If I had been able to make a cleaner report, I would have made a proper bugzilla bug out of it. As it is, I am hoping others see the same issue so we can narrow it down a bit.

I can try to manually list the.desktop widgets I have installed. They are:

Forecaweather widget
Tunewiki Desktop Widget
Tutorial applet (installed but removed from desktop)
tweakr (installed but no settings changed)
Eyes widget
Facebook widget
Personal dataplan monitor
Touchsearch
Builtin RSS widget
Builtin Calendar widget
Builtin Ovi maps mini-map widget
Builtin Ovi launch bar
Builtin Music Widget

There are some status-menu related apps I forgot in my previous post too:
cpumem-applet
flashlight
callnotify
Headphone daemon
Shortcutd

And in addition all the apps I mentioned in the previous post.

I should mention that I saw the status area (hildon-status-menu) go wild again yesterday. Now that I am on the look-out for it, I notice it seems to be happening quite often (several times a week). Unfortunately it tends to utterly kill the battery when it happens. It also makes the whole phone very sluggish.(perhaps the memory usage forces a lot of swapping). Finally you don't notice the CPU usage with cpumem-applet, since it is the status area itself that is the problem. You need to start Conky or similar to see the issue.