I've seen very high load averages on almost-idle machines, when their NFS servers have disappeared. The kernel's idea of what is a "runnable" process includes things that are waiting on short-term events, IIRC.

I think that there's a problem somewhere with the player causing lots of threads to block like this, but I don't know how to investigate it. I think that this is what is causing very slow UI processing when the player is reading from disk, and the "low-battery" indicator to appear when coming out of pause, though I can't back up these beliefs.

Could it be related to the fix for stuck jiffies?