It turns out that the issue was I had some bad memory. I ran memtest to confirm and then replaced it. Voila! No more problem with Core Temp. The other telltale sign was that I was also having problems with my Spybot adware applet. It thought that its had been changed and warned me about a possible virus. After some due diligence I found a post that pointed to the bad memory. The issue didn't show itself in any other apps except for Core Temp and Spybot.
Hope this helps.
Vern