LaunchCFMApp is hogging CPU

The process is caused by an old PPC program that is not fully compatible with an Intel CPU. The process itself is not the problem; it's the PPC program that is. Find out what old PowerPC program you are running and kill it. Does that help?

My best guess is that it's a MS Office program like Word or Excel, perhaps Photoshop, perhaps something else in your login or startup items.

Launch terminal (in Utilities). And copy/paste the following line.

ps axww | grep -i LaunchCFMApp

The output should show you what LaunchCFMApp is trying to launch.

Nice answer, thanks. To add that if the thing it's trying to launch looks safe to kill ( mine was something like Microsoft office 2004 Database blah blah old thingy I surely dont want ) then you can kill it by taking the number in the first column of output and doing this

( suppose the output was this

32111 ?? R 174:01.73 /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Support/LaunchCFMApp /Applications/MicroCrap/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Microsoft Database Daemon

39877 s001 S+ 0:00.00 grep -i launchcfmapp

then you do this in terminal to kill it

sudo kill 32111