Garageband refuses to quit

Question

For some odd reason Garageband keeps giving me a weird error message about a ReWire connection being active and will not let me quit. The strange thing is I don't have ReWire installed, so I'm not sure why it's giving me this message. Anyone have any ideas? I'd rather not Force Quit it if I don't have to.
As long as I'm here I have another question, too. I've also noticed lately that pretty much everything is running ridiculously slow on my MacBook Pro (2.16 GHz Core Duo). When exporting a song as an MP3 in Garageband, it bogs down my computer (using about 40-50% of my CPU) and sometimes gives me the Pinwheel of Death for a minute or two. It also takes a lot longer to switch between instruments on software tracks than it did before. When publishing a file in Flash, the same thing happens, except it takes up more of my CPU and gives me the PoD almost every time. Repairing permissions on my hard drive will take between 80% and 90% of my CPU and takes about 10 minutes to finish, all the while saying "1 minute remaining..."
Even simple things take a lot longer than they should. Photoshop sometimes freezes for a minute or two while resizing an image. Using Camino sometimes takes up about 20% CPU, usually when I'm not even using it for anything and it's just running in the background. I also sometimes get a 15 or 20 second lag when trying to mount a disk image. This all gets incredibly frustrating because I've been spending a lot of my time lately working on a Flash project I'm doing, so I'm constantly using Flash, Photoshop and Garageband. I'm wondering if there's anything I should do to fix it or if It's hardware related.
I ran an Xbench test while typing this and I'm wondering if my hard drive is going bad on me. The CPU test was decent (except for the vecLib FFT score, whatever that is). The hard drive test score was terrible, though. Everything else got pretty good scores. Here's the results of CPU and hard drive tests:
CPU Test 91.16
GCD Loop 276.58 14.58 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 97.17 2.31 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 49.03 1.62 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 104.43 18.18 Mops/sec
Disk Test 22.22
Sequential 36.83
Uncached Write 35.51 21.80 MB/sec 4K blocks
Uncached Write 30.88 17.47 MB/sec 256K blocks
Uncached Read 41.97 12.28 MB/sec 4K blocks
Uncached Read 41.25 20.73 MB/sec 256K blocks
Random 15.91
Uncached Write 5.12 0.54 MB/sec 4K blocks
Uncached Write 41.33 13.23 MB/sec 256K blocks
Uncached Read 60.30 0.43 MB/sec 4K blocks
Uncached Read 66.24 12.29 MB/sec 256K blocks
Would this be causing the ridiculous amount of CPU my laptop has been using lately? Also, would that be covered under my AppleCare plan or am I stuck just buying a new one? Any help with this is appreciated.
Message was edited by: Wes Moberly

Answer 1

I've never installed ReWire before (I had never even heard of ReWire before this message popped up). The only things Garageband-related I've installed recently are a Jam Pack and 2 Boldt 24-packs. The Jam Pack installation was the reason I needed to quit Garageband in the first place, though, so I doubt it was that. I ended up just force-quitting it and I haven't had the problem since. Weird, though.
My main concern at this point is my hard drive and the immense amount of CPU that every application is using. The Apple store wasn't any help; they told me they could do a diagnostics test on it and if it was the hard drive the test would be free but if the hardware was all fine they'd charge me $59 for it. I really think something is wrong with it, though. Aside from the pitiful Xbench scores it got, the CPU spike mostly seems to happen when accessing the hard drive (publishing a Flash project file, exporting to disk in Garageband, etc.).