Safari 5 slow to load pages and fails to resolve addresses - flickering men

Question

At first safari 5 worked great, a day after it began to take ages to resolve and address or worse to load a page. Now I stare at the loading item x of x for ages before a page will come up.
Also, open a couple of tabs and all menus start to flicker when you open them (file, edit, so on) as if a slow refresh effect and I have to close down safari.
Now I clock about 8 to 9 seconds (measured) to open a site that Chrome opens in 3..what gives?
Windows 7 64
Nvidia GTs 250 1gb onboard mem
2 tb hard drive (plenty free)
8gigs of fast ram

Answer 1

I'm having the exact same problem with Safari. Will try the cnet advice and get back here with results. Recently the whole thing ended with Safari crashing. Here is my log:
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Safari.exe
Application Version: 5.33.16.0
Application Timestamp: 4c087bce
Fault Module Name: CoreFoundation.dll
Fault Module Version: 1.550.26.13
Fault Module Timestamp: 4bff35d2
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0003b437
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 4105
Additional Information 1: 0a9e
Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Additional Information 3: 0a9e
Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
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Maybe it will help someone. I'm on Windows 7 x64 but my issue is exactly the same as OP.