My fancy(ish) new(ish) PC has been running the fan louder for a day, and I finally explored things. Task manager said Chrome was running two cores at 50% for some reason...
I look at Chrome's Task manager, and it showed two web pages running 25% each.
I had opened something that crashed Shockwave yesterday (day before?) and those two pages were just sitting waiting for me to click "restart Shockwave" 
Two Google Chrome pages doing nothing but waiting for me to click "fix me" was burning up a quarter of my PC.
Eep! 
Shockwave can be horrible, yes. But so much power because it crashed? 
Shockwave can be horrible, yes. But so much power because it crashed?
At that point, it wasn't Shockwave doing anything. It was Chrome staring at me dedicatedly waiting for me to click a button without actually indicating "there's a button over there to click".