Getting the spinning wheel when switching between accounts

Hi all,
I am getting the spinning wheel when switching between accounts on a mac mini. There are two accounts and quite often when we go from one to the other we get the spinning beachball after putting in the password to log in. I am finding the only real solution to be is to put the machine to sleep (button at the back for a sec or two) wait for it to go to sleep and then wake it up and it mostly will then log in and keep working.
It's an older intel dual core mac mini with an upgraded HDD. I previously had an iMac running snow leopard where the same problem occured and recently migrated over the account to the mini running Lion. It seems to be happening more often.
I also seem to remember that occasionally when using say Pages you would get the spinning beachball and then you would have to hit the desktop or go to another program and then back to pages to get it working again.

Does it occur no matter which way you're going say? i.e, both from
User 1 -> User 2
User 2 -> User 1
If its only one way, have a look at the 3rd party loginitems for the account your going to. If its both ways, see what 3rd party loginitems both accounts have in common. The best (though time consuming) way to eliminate the culprit is to remove all 3rd party apps from loginitems and add them in one at a time, testing for the problem each time.
If you get the BSOD while actually logged in (say, while using Pages), try running activity monitor (or use terminal.app with the command 'top -u' (without the quotation marks)), and see if you can notice any process running at more than 30%CPU.

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