Ifconfig hangs consuming all cpu

Question

I just ungraded my 2005-6ish 13" mac book to snow leopard and I noticed that when I was connected to wifi my CPU was pegged at 100% despite not doing anything. Checking the activity monitor showed two instances of ifconfig consuming all my CPU, and they just kept running and running.
I tried force quitting them and new ones popped back in their place. Starting up a terminal I checked for running ifconfigs:
[12:03:57 ~]$ ps -aex | grep ifconfig
8310   ??  S      0:00.00 /bin/sh -c ifconfig -a | grep inet
8311   ??  R      1:40.05 ifconfig -a
8317   ??  S      0:00.00 sh -c ifconfig en1 | awk '{ if(match($1,/ether/)) print $2; }'
8318   ??  R      1:18.01 ifconfig en1
And if I run ifconfig directly, it just hangs never completing:
[12:03:14 ~]$ /sbin/ifconfig.old
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
        inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
        inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
        inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
gif0: flags=8010<POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST> mtu 1280
stf0: flags=0<> mtu 1280
en0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
        media: autoselect
        status: inactive
fw0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 2030
        lladdr XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
        media: autoselect <full-duplex>
        status: inactive
en1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
        inet X.X.X.X netmask 0xfffffc00 broadcast X.X.X.X
        Configuration:
                priority 0 hellotime 0 fwddelay 0 maxage 0
                ipfilter disabled flags 0x0
I thought it might be something related to my account, but it also happens if I log into the guest account. This happens on multiple wifi networks and after a clean boot. Software update says I'm completely up to date. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm not sure why this solution works. I didn't dig very deep after I used it to fix the problem on my Powerbook G4. However, if you're interested there is a discussion here:
http://smartic.us/2007/11/8/leopard-100-cpu-usage-caused-by-syslogd-and-possibly -time-machine
There is also a short article in the "TipBITS" column at http://db.tidbits.com/
Just search for "syslogd", that's where I found the info I passed along here.