Diagnosing strange behaviour: Long pauses for dialogue boxes/slips

I've been enduring this odd situation for some weeks now and it's getting quite annoying: when slips and dialogue boxes appear in all applications there is a long pause and the beach ball cursor appears. The pause can last between 5 and 15 seconds wherein the application is unresponsive. Strangely this only seems to happen the first time the slip appears: successive appearances present little or no delay and can be dismissed as soon as they appear.
I have tried all the usual incantations and maintenance routines with no improvement. In my mind this behaviour commenced with the latest Software Update (10.4.6) but this may be coincidence.
I'd be surprised if anyone has a ready solution for this problem so what I'd like instead is some suggestions on how to go about diagnosing such things. I've tried using Activity Manager but there are many processes that mean nothing to me. I wouldn't know if they were malignant if they reared up and bit me. Perhaps the Console and various log files may be useful but I don't know what to look for.
I'd appreciate any suggestions, remedies or pointers to sources of further information.
Thanks.
1.25 GHz PowerBook G4 15", 512 MB DDR SDRAM Mac OS X (10.4.3) Shoe size: 11

Hi, Andrew.
Two further suggestions:
1. Do you have a second user account defined on your system? If so, log in to it and see if the problem happens there. If it does, it is probably a system-wide problem. If not, it is something with your user account. If you don't have a second account on your system, you can create a new one using System Preferences > Accounts.
2. See if a third-party Startup or Login Item may be causing the issue. My "Troubleshooting Startup and Login Items" FAQ can help you pin that down if such an item is causing the problem.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

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I missed 1 thing , in the gc trace
jvm 1 | [GC [DefNew: 22386K->1496K(23872K), 0.0121308 secs] 229932K->209042K(
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Chaula

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