I am tired of spinning beachballs

[Obrecht, Jerry A]

>
>Since I upgraded to 10.2.4 I see way to much of spinning beachballs and 
>bouncing dock items.  Sometimes the first application boots quickly, 
>but any subsequent application bounces for literally minutes.  My Mail 
>application invariably gives me a spinning beachball  and after a 
>considerable wait, tells me it can't locate the spelling checker and, 
>of course, fails to input the last half of the sentence I was typing.  
>What did I do wrong.  Everything was snappy before.  Now it acts like 
>its working on something much more important than what I want to do.  
>Ran disk utility (and fixed permissions) and Drive 10.  No problems.  
>Is there something I need to do.  Also, I waited a couple of weeks to 
>mention this thinking that maybe things would correct themselves, or it 
>would finish doing what was dominating its time.  Do I need to cast 
>some "terminal" spells?
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I would suggest trying two things, and hopefully one of them corrects the problem.  First, if you haven't yet, run the Repair Permissions utility on the DVD restore disc.  If you haven't ever used this, after you put the disc in, launch the Installer, then from the Installer menu pick "Disk Utility" (?) I think is the menu item pick, then from the window that comes up click on Repair Permissions.  After running this, and after quitting the Installer, do a Restart.  See if this helps.  Many slowdowns in 10.2.x are the result of wrong permissions settings.  For some reason (a buggy Installer?), OS upgrades can cause permissions settings to go wrong.  

The other alternative is to install the 10.2.4 Combo updater on top of your 10.2.4. Some 10.2.4 problems have been corrected by running the Combo updater on top of the .4 stand-alone updater.

If neither of these work, you likely will need to re-install 10.2.3, or whatever version you were running prior to the 10.2.4 upgrade.  Unfortunately, you can't just "back-out" the .4 upgrade (wish it were possible).  Since your problems began right after the .4 upgrade, the .4 upgrade is very likely at fault.  It has some, in my estimation, significant bugs that strike randomly...some people believe that it is a bug in the installer, not in the OS upgrade.  If one were to go to www.macintouch.com and go to their 10.2.4 Reader Reports page, you would see a number of problems reported. http://www.macintouch.com/mosxreader10.2pt53.html#mar11 links to the more recent reports. 

Jerry