After reading over this post, seems like there are a couple different issues being discussed here - Stratight up blinking (crashing) or the right top menu after an upgrade form 10.8.1 to 10.8.2/3, then a CPU spiking systemUIserver process.... My issue was the former- I had to remove each menu extra until i found the one that was stopping systemUIserver......... Possibly not a move you should try unless you know what you're doing..... (my bad)
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Probably not a good idea to "rm -rf" that since it "deletes" that plugin for good. The issue was resolved for me due to the timemachine.menu having a permissions issue that would crash systemUIserver.
You can extract the Timemachine.menu item from the Mountain Lion InstallESD.dmg which you can re-download from the App store (easy to find instructions online to figure this out - mount the dmg and drag the timemachine.menu from the image to your system to return it).
If you wish to futher trouble-shoot your crashing systemUIserver and you think it's a Menu ectra item, try moving them out of that location one at a time to find the one thats broken.
\
better command:
sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/TimeMachine.menu /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/bak.TimeMachine.menu
then
"sudo rm -rf /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/TimeMachine.menu"