Same here with TC 7.2 in 2017 ..
Hint: it might have to do with running cli ncurses based extensions in X loaded installed with "ondemand". I'm still investigating.
Example:
Generic install of 7.2 on a i586 Pentium (Dell Inspiron 8100). Frugal install to hard disk. ext2 fs
Loaded a few extensions: htop, cfdisk, and nano as "ondemand".
When called up from the gui Aterm terminal, they fail or the process runs away. I quicky use xkill or kill to stop them.
At first I thought just using a cli-based program in a cli environment (ctrl-alt-f1) would do the trick, but they sometimes just ran away there too.
Long story short, I did on-demand extension maintenance, and removed them from the ondemand list. Now they seem to be stable if I'm in the cli, or in an aterm.
The irony is watching htop run away with 100% cpu.
It's probably me, so I'm going to do more research about optimizing ondemand.