Alan Malloy wrote:

1. ssh into my machine from somewhere else

2. fire up emacs in terminal mode

3. suspend the emacs process with C-z

4. violently kill the ssh process on the other machine, so that it
doesn't send a clean logout

Symptoms:

The emacs process remains alive on my machine, quickly climbs to 100%
CPU usage,

Is this with `emacs -Q -nw'? Because I could not reproduce it with
Emacs 23.1 or 23.2 using -Q. If it does not happen with -Q, please try
to narrow down a precise recipe starting from -Q.

In GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (i486-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
 of 2010-11-23 on rothera, modified by Debian