Thanks for the reply and confirmation that such high CPU usage is not normal. In response to your questions:
1) 5.1.44_1
2) Correct…connected with NoMachine, and the only application updating in “Task Manager” with which I’m monitoring the performance.
3) Toggling “Use acceleration..” on/off doesn’t seem to have any effect. Also tried all compression options. H.264 was not significantly different from VP8, while MPEG dropped CPU usage about 10%.
While waiting for a reply to my questions I’ve experimented with RealVNC server on this Windows machine, and Remmina on the client. With the VNC connection the Windows machine CPU idles with Task Manager running @ 5-6%… hardly different from no remote desktop performance.
When I get a little more time to work on it, I’ll email the log files to see if that tells us anything more.