Follow up to using coin control to reduce the amount of blocks and reducing cpu use.  It works!

2 weeks ago I had over 8000 blocks and my cpu was at 19.3%
I started combining blocks with the goal of getting down to 100.  There was no noticeable change in cpu until I got down to 900 blocks, this takes time if you want to preserve your coin age and I figure I will be down to about 80 blocks in 2 more weeks.

Currently sitting at 140 blocks and cpu use is at 5%, which is a big improvement - thanks for the tips!

Anyone who has high cpu use with the wallet might want to use the coin control and start consolidating the blocks into a smaller number, it's definitely made an improvement for me.