GarageBand hangs when opening, but will eventually open- what's the problem

Question

Hi,
I just upgraded from GarageBand 2 to GarageBand 3. Previously, everything was on my start-up drive. When I upgraded, I moved all the files I could (loops and the like) to a media drive while keeping everything else on the start-up drive. Now, when I open GB3, it hangs and hangs, beach ball spinning, and the name of the application turns red in Activity Monitor, like it's frozen. But, it does eventually open up, after a minute or two, literally. It seems to hang when it starts loading the instruments used in the track. But it still does open and work fine! Well, not exactly fine, it also takes a lot longer than it used to to load a new instrument when I select a new one. Does anyone know what the issue may be?
Oh, and, I tried opening a file, then saving it as something different, then opening that new file, but it does the same thing.
Thanks!
William

Answer 1

Thanks for your response, xs4is. I am not on the offending machine at this moment, so I'll have to test your suggestions later this evening. Let me explain a little further what I did that lead up to the issues I'm now experiencing.
I had iLife 05 that came with my computer. I was upgrading to iLife 06. Everything from iLife 05 was on my boot drive- that's how it came and I never changed it. I have the second drive that I use for media files (I edit video- all of those files, my itunes library, etc. is on this drive). Prior to upgrading, I wanted to move everything I could (loops and stuff like that) to the second drive. So, there's a point in the installation right before it actually installs everything- it tells you where it's going to put a bunch of folders, it gives you the path and lets you know you can put them somewhere else if you'd like (ex. "SuchAndSuch" Folder will be installed in /Library/Application Support/Garageband. If you want to, you can choose a different folder. (to paraphrase)). At this point (for each of the folders full of files that it was installing), I followed the path it gave, took the folder that was already there ("SuchAndSuch") and copied it to the second drive, I then deleted that original folder and redirected the installer to the new folder. I even duplicated the folder path, to make it easier for me to understand, so that for the example above, the new path was "SuchAndSuch" Folder will be installed in /MediaDrive/Library/Application Support/Garageband. I am certain I did this part correctly. I created the "Library", "Application Support", & "Garageband" folders-- I only actually moved that last folder and deleted it off the Boot Drive. Anyway, I was pretty sure all this was okay to do because I was only moving the original stuff it was telling me it would be updating or replacing... I hope this makes sense and might help to figure just where or where I went wrong.
I'll have to look later to make sure, but I'm pretty sure there were no other duplicate software instruments in the browser window. There may be dplicates on the drive but not in the window I suppose. And I deleted the old ones off the boot drive.
That's a good idea of creating the alias folder- this could be the root of the problem. But I figured it'd be okay since I was telling the installer to install the stuff on the second drive.
I suspect there may be some small files that I moved to the second drive that really should be on the boot drive- some sort of files that act as a map or something for garageband. Maybe an invisible file? ...I hate those invisible files.
**Oh wait!** I just remembered something, when I was copying those folders (like I was saying above), it did prompt me for my admin name and password! So, wouldn't that mean I was moving something, well, important? Instead of just the loops and stuff?
Yeah, that's probably a key clue, eh?
I'll also try the Garageband index tip and let you know.
Thanks so much for your help!!
William