gnome cpu and memory usage is high in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Issue

• Very few users logged into GUI interface. However, gnome-panel for specific user takes up all the CPU cycles.
• Affected user is just sitting idle, doing nothing.
• Following top output shows the usage for affected user xyz

top - 06:33:33 up 20 days, 15:40, 10 users,  load average: 2.05, 2.25, 2.17
Tasks: 593 total,   8 running, 582 sleeping,   0 stopped,   3 zombie
Cpu(s): 29.0%us, 10.8%sy,  0.0%ni, 59.7%id,  0.5%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.1%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  98920820k total, 98663140k used,   257680k free,      452k buffers
Swap: 33554428k total, 16985180k used, 16569248k free,   111916k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  SWAP COMMAND
 9617 xyz       20   0 71.1g  56g  972 R 100.0 59.5 151:28.05  14g gnome-panel