I'd like to set the nice level of a process to 19, but have any future child processes keep the default nice of 0. Basically, I want the child processes to ignore inheritance. But it seems impossible to do in a simple way.

My problem, specifically, is xfce4-menu-plugin. Every 5 minutes or so, it refreshes or something (I really have no idea what it's doing!), disrupting audio playback of other apps. I can't figure out a way to turn this off. Reniceing it to 19 solves the disruption problem, but it means any programs run from the menu are now also at nice level 19. I can't think of a simple way around this, apart from "stop using it". Which at this point seems quite likely!

Thanks.

Well, for anyone having trouble with xfce4-menu-plugin, what I've done is to remove it from the panel, and add a Launcher to the panel with the command xfdesktop -menu, which is essentially the same thing. Why this doesn't give me problems, I'll never know..

I'd still be interested if anyone had an answer to my original question of reniceing.