Font Book beach ball, crashing

Question

I have about 2000 fonts I'm trying to sort with Font Book, and I'm encountering two really frustrating problems:
1) I'm getting beach balls on start up, and pretty much every other function I go to do. There's a lag time like the system is choking from a lack of memory - but my Macbook is maxed out with 4gb of ram.
2) If I add a duplicate font to a collection by accident, Font Book immediately quits. Obviously in the course of sorting fonts, it's hard remember exactly what you added, so doubling up, adding the same font is unavoidable.

Answer 1

I am getting simular issues, FCPX works like a dream. Motion 5, not so much. It opens fine, but as soon as I start looking through the library at the content, the beach ball does it's thing.
I have an iMac, OS X (V10.6.8)
Processor: 3.06GHz MHz 2 Duo
Memory: 12 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
No matter what I do, the Beach ball spins forever, and then I get a message saying "That I have too many apps open and need to close some". But most of the time all I have open is Motion and Safari.
Or I get the "Motion is no longer responding" message.
And when I have Motion open, and not doing anything with it, my iMac slows down. Even using Sarfari is painful.
Anyone have any hit or tips for this problem?
Thanks