10.4.4 Slows Systems

Question

Ever since uprading to 10.4.4 from 10.4.3 on my PowerBook, working in an application will suddenly cause it to freeze with the spinning rainbow. I can still work in other applications but need to force quit the frozen application.
Sometimes I cannot restart the application - it loads the menu bar but won't go any further requiring a reboot. Several other Mac users in my family have reported similar findings of system lagging causing refresh issues, slow UI response, and occassional application freezing. All since 10.4.4.
In the last few days I've rebooted my laptop every couple hours. Prior to that I would only shutdown when leaving home. I measured uptimes in days/weeks.
I rebuilt my laptop by erasing the drive and all free space, set a new partition and then installed Tiger and ran the 10.4.4 update.
It has been running better but after 10 minutes of running Microsoft Word, the same thing happened.
I've noticed that this affects Word, Excel but not Entourage which runs constantly. It also affects Swift Publisher.
It doesn't affect Safari (except slowness in loading some sites). iTunes always runs just fine as does Mail, iCal, iSync, Pages, and Keynote.
I hope that Apple releases an update soon that fixes these errors. It has been better since the rebuild but I don't like having to save a document every five minutes because the program is expected to crash.
12" PB G4 1 GHz, 768 MB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.4)  

Answer 1

I just did some further digging and found that when I got the recurring spinning beachball of death with Microsoft Word, the message at the bottom was that Word was trying to open up a printer connection.
In my case, my default printer (a shared one) was offline and not available. By deleting the printer, I was able to reopen the document and go right past the point where it had consistently stalled.
This might explain why Word, Excel, and Swift Publisher ran into problems but Entourage, iTunes and Safari did not, as they don't try to open up a printer connection until you actually tell it to print.
I'll continue to monitor this as others have had problems with Microsoft Office programs.