Aperture Library Size slowing iMac even when Aperture is closed

I recently purchased an iMac 22 quad core running Lion, with all updates.  It currently has 12GB of Ram, and 190GB free on the hard drive.
The iMac would load programs like Outlook within a few seconds and was very fast.
I purchased Aperture and migrated about 38,000 images, using the exisitng file structure from my PC.  This took about 12 hours yo process, update images, etc...
Even if Aperture is closed, all programs now load much more slowly.  Outlook can take 20-30 seconds to open, and lists of email and contacts now take as much as a minute to load. 
This is only true for the user account with the Aperture library, as programs for other users seems to work fine.
I tried running disk utilities, restarting machine, but no difference.
Activity monitor shows no unusual memory, CPU or disk activity.
I started a new user account, and all worked fine again...until I again created an aperture library, and again, even if Aperture is not started, everyting else runs slowly.
Is there a file indexing feature that is overwhelmed by the addition of a large aperture library?  (Deleting the Aperture library doe snot solve the problem-only startign a new user accountdoes).

dphughes wrote:
...in both cases maintaining referenced files stored outside the catalog/library. The Aperture library is 500% the size of the Lightroom catalog - even with restricted preview sizes and no vault.
If this is true, there must be a logical explanation that is giving Aperture users some benefit for the increased Library size. Sorry been a long time since I looked at Lightroom. Does it store the same size previews and thumbnails as Aperture? Since you are using referenced files and Aperture is using non-destructive edits and even new versions do not create duplicate files (only a new set of pointers to the referenced masters), one would think previews and thumbnails must be handled differently. Since you use both, what could it be?
The Aperture Vault is a separate library than the Aperture Library so having a Vault of course should not impact the size of the Aperture Library.

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