QuickLookSatellite MAC OS, High CPU Use

Troubleshooting steps:

• See if there are any relevant log messages in Console.app or /var/log/system.log.
• Use qlmanage -r to reset Quick Look client's generator cache.
• Run sudo opensnoop -n QuickLookSatellite-general to see if the process hangs after accessing some specific files. Or select QuickLookSatellite-general in Activity Monitor, press command-I, and see the Open Files and Ports tab.
• Temporarily delete Movie.qlgenerator, Audio.qlgenerator, or other qlgenerator bundles in /System/Library/QuickLook, and run qlmanage -r.
• Temporarily remove applications shown by qlmanage -p | grep /Applications/.
• Disable quicklookd with launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.quicklook.*. The plists are loaded again after you log out and back in.

If nothing else works, you could try doing an upgrade install of OS X from the recovery partition.

What I also found helpful was to turn on QuickLook debugging so I could see exactly what files were being processed. You can do that with this in the terminal. More info in the Mac Developer Library.

defaults write -g QLEnableLogging YES

You can also adjust the debugging level using qlmanage -d debuglevel. Run qlmanage -h for more info.

In my particular case it was QuickSilver causing the issue, which I fixed by disabling image previews using this command in the terminal. My thread on that is here.

defaults write com.blacktree.quicksilver "QSLoadImagePreviews" NO

Also see this similar AskDifferent question.