Sometimes plasmashell consumes a great amount of CPU cycles. This is happening while Skype is animating its tray icon, which it does whenever network is down. Closing Skype or bringing the network up stops the CPU overload, therefore it's likely that Plasma is doing some resource-intensive action whenever a tray icon is updated. This should be optimized so rapid icon updates don’t cause the overload.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 378010 ***
Skype can do it's system tray via two modes, SNI or xmebed. Depending on if the Qt4 32 bit SNI plugin is installed. Easy way to tell is kill xembedsniproxy, if the icon disappears it was xembed - and we could maybe rate limit.