[X4U] Beach Ball

[Ralph]

Guess I didn't give quite enough information.

The iMac in question is the primary printing station in a networked  
graphics environment. It talks to three network printers and the  
Internet via Airport, and to a pair of local printers and a scanner  
via USB.

The Airport base station is an older model 802.11B unit. It serves as  
the gateway to an Ethernet network with a pair of routers serving two  
HP PostScript laser printers (one color, one B/W), a G4 PowerMac, a  
Windows 2000 workstation, a Canon ImageRunner and a T-1 Internet  
connection.

Also communicating with the base station wirelessly are another G4  
PowerMac desktop and a PowerBook G4. The PowerMac desktop has several  
hard drives, one of which is the master repository for client files  
from all the other computers. Files are archived by transferring over  
the network.

The iMac is loaded to the gills with USB connections: through direct  
connections and a USB hub, it talks to an HP scanner, an HP large- 
format inkjet printer, an Epson medium-format inkjet printer, a USB  
wireless adapter, a multi-format camera card reader, keyboard, mouse  
and a USB flash memory stick for sneakernet file transfer.

The iMac is restarted every day. I installed Tiger Cache Cleaner on  
it recently; this sped it up a little. It also runs Norton AntiVirus.

Hmm... that's a lot of info I left out!

 From Michael's response, I infer that any of the USB devices could  
be a problem; guess I'll start there. I've never looked at a log in  
Console.app -- but I'll research how to do that.

TIA for any further thoughts.

Ralph Jones