IPhoto inoperable - slow, impossible to browse photos

Hi All,
Would appreciate your help on this. Recently made the switch to Mac and loving it, but for this new problem:
iPhoto is basically inoperable - browsing lags 10 seconds behind each click. Here are the facts:
- Running latest Mountain Lion OSX 10.8.2
- MP Retina, 4GB RAM
- Never had a problem with iPhoto before - have 14,000 pics, ~74GB in pictures
- Prior to this problem, my Mac Greyscreen crashed and wouldn't boot up because I had no more space on the Start up disk.  I managed to go into safe mode and clear space and it starts up now, but iPhoto has become vegatative!
- I have read and tried the following fixes: Opening iPhoto with Shift+option+cmd and: rebuilding thumbnails, rebuilding permissions, repairing library etc and nothing has helped
Any ideas guys? It's not the beachball problem like other people have posted about, its the problem where I can barely operate iPhoto... one click and it takes 10 seconds to respond. I'm at my wits end here.
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated - please bear in mind I'm a Mac noob, so console commands may take a bit of explaining...
Cheers,
Jacob

Jacob, first thing to do would be to launch the Activity Monitor (from Applications > Utilities), to see which Application is using all the CPU time, and also look fore disk usage - page outs, etc.
crashed and wouldn't boot up because I had no more space on the Start up disk.  I managed to go into safe mode and clear space and it starts up now, but iPhoto has become vegatative!
how much free disk space do you now have? My guess it, you did not free enough space. Try to free at least 20 GB.
Post back, if freeing more disk space helps. How did you repair your library? With the First Aid Window or with iPhoto Library Manager?
Regards
Léonie

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