[X4U] Spinning BeachBall Delay in Finder

[LA Licata]

Dear list,

I am running 17" PB g4, system 10.4.10, all software up-to-date. For  
the record, first installed the incremental update to get to .10, but  
that made the machine flaky. Downloaded the combo and flaky  
performance was gone (That was in June.)

I have a work folder that has 1400 embedded folders in it, and totals  
about 3.6 GB.

When I need to make a change to an item in the folder, I get a  
spinning beach ball forever... In activity monitor, Finders takes up  
about 57% of CPU and coreservicesd takes up about 33% of CPU. I  
believe it started about 2-3 weeks ago, but not sure. I checked to  
see if I did any updates, and I updated both Quicktime and Itunes.  
Neither are running when I am working on this folder.

I then logged in under another account that I try to keep as "virgin"  
as possible and there was no spinning beach ball delay.

So, went back to my normal account and thinking that it was a cache  
problem, deleted them all. No change. Ran Cocktail and Tinkertool  
System with no change.

No, I know I can create a new account but I believe that I am not the  
first, and the fix is probably staring me in the face.

BTW, reran the combo updater and there was no change

I recently followed the thread of someone who deleted some cache  
files at the root level with some pain, so wanted to proceed with  
caution.

I do have a drive disk image backup from April (10.4.9) and there are  
some files in the current cache folders at the root level both in  
Library and System folders that are not in the image, bit not 100%  
sure that 10.4.10 did not put them there.

I also thought that I could delete any file in a cache folder and  
while I might lose some functionality, like auto password fill in,  
but have paused when looking at the root level cache files.

I did create a new folder and moved all of the sub-folders into it,  
but the problem remains.

I have other folders that are not this large, and they do not seem to  
have a problem but it could be because they are smaller. I could  
create a large folder and test but thought I would first ask.....

Anyone got a hint, please?

TIA

Lee