beach ball of death keeps showing up - please help!

[mlevin77]

I just cooked a ROM from the 6.0 kitchen and am getting weird behavior with the spinning beach ball. It comes on every 5 seconds, spins for 8, and goes away, repeating continuously (I can see it when on the Today screen). It's really annoying, and I don't know what causes it - I'm just sitting here in the Today screen, doing nothing, and watching this beach ball come and go. I currently have 10.85 MB free in Storage, and 20.71 MB free in Program. It is making the whole system very slow. I had seen this once or twice in my previous ROM but it always went away after a reboot.
One thing I did notice that may give a clue as to what it's doing. I have SPB Pocket Plus, and after a reboot, some of the tabs on its Today plugin have generic icons. Right after the beachball first came and went, the icon became correct. Is it updating stuff regularly somehow, or accessing my SD card, or what?!?

Mike