Aperture simply unusable on new iMac with Lion

Question

I bought a new iMac having been a happy user for many years (iMac 21.5" i3 3.06GHz with 4G RAM), and thought I'd upgrade to Aperture as I want to get a little more creative with my photos.
I was astounded when I imported my iPhoto library of about 60GB that it was still "processing"after 24 hours, but I let it be and it seemed ok
I've just done my first import of about 300 photos from a holiday (they're on an 16GB card so it can't be that big...) and all seemed fine until I quit Aperture and reopened it - now it's back to "processing" and running at snail's pace.  It's been at it for about an hour so far.
This renders this totally useless software - but if I click on "report a problem" on the email receipt, I'm simply taken to the support pages - and if I try to actually contact Apple they tell me my hardware is out of its free support period so there's nothing I can do!
This is absolutely outrageous - I paid £55 for software that simply doesn't work on an almost new machine - and yet apparently it's tough because my machine is more than 3 months old!  Can this be right?
And am I missing something, or is Aperture supposed to take several hours to open up?  It's unuseable as it is.
Secondly, where are my photos that I've uploaded into Aperture?  I've deleted them off the card, so I want to at least import them into iPhoto so I can give up using this heap of junk and ask for my money back.
Thanks

Answer 1

I see what you are saying andyfromembsay, but most software companies have you buy support after a certain period of time. I just had an issue with Parallels that showed up after thirty days since I installed the program, to get support now I would have to buy it even though I never submitted a support issue in the first thirty days.With Apple if you buy the extended warranty you get support for three years.  I didn't buy the Parallels extra support, it was quite expensive, I went to their forums and found the answer I needed.
Anyways, there is another thread in these discussions about Aperture being slow, it seemed to clear up after an update to 10.7.1. Also someone mentioned using Disk Warrior to clean up a fragmented directories. That is the one piece of software I wouldn't be without. It has saved me so many times!  I ran Disk Warrior before I even upgraded to Lion, fixed a bunch of fragmentation. The upgrade has been smooth. I have not had any glitches with Aperture. I also do not have Time Machine backing up constantly. I have it back up once every 12 hours using Time Machine scheduler, that has also been reported as a problem.
I do think you have an issue, it shouldn't be updating like that, mine hasn't been doing any updating that I can see. I still have the Trial, so maybe that is different, but I used software update to update it to the 3.1. I will probably buy it, but I don't usually spend more than a few bucks on software that I haven't tried out, I have wasted too much money on programs that are not really good and the developer abandons after a year!  I always download a trial before getting software if I have a choice. The Aperture trial was not in the App store, I had to Google to find it, but glad I did, I really wanted to see if it was worth spending more for it than just upgrading to the latest iPhoto (now that is a program that annoys me!) I think it is.