Switching Countries Causes Increased CPU Usage

If I switch the country or timezone to America the CPU usage increases and lags a good amount. I first noticed this running OpenELEC 1.95.5 on my HTPC but it also seems to happen on my old P4 running Windows XP, just not to the same extent. Both are running XBMC v11 and the Transparency! skin (I've also noticed this with the default skin). The HTPC was pissing me off because CPU usage on both cores would get to 75+% when I wasn't even doing anything, my initial though was SABnzbd was causing it but when running htop it showed as only using 3% in each of the four processes. After a fresh install it dropped back down to 3 and ~50%, once I customized everything (didn't install any add-ons except for the skin) and rebooted it was back up to 75% on both cores. Not knowing what caused it I did another fresh install and went through the settings systematically, rebooting after changing stuff in each category. I narrowed it down to Settings -> Appearance -> International -> Timezone Country (which the Windows build doesn't seem to have). If I left it on Aaland Islands it would fine, but if I changed it to anything in America the CPU usage would spike and stay that way. It did the same thing with a few other Timezone countries such as Vatican City, but there were too many to test them all. Just for the hell of it I just changed the country for in the Windows build (since it doesn't have the Timezone and Timezone Country settings) and the CPU usage (single core) dropped from ~32% to ~23%, the speed of the interface improved drastically.

The odd thing is there isn't anything in the debug logs to substantiate this claim, the only thing I have to back this up is a video I took of the HTPC running OpenELEC, which can be found here: http://youtu.be/_uZXe-rELDw

Any suggestions what may be causing this?