Grey screen and spinning wheel - and very slow iBook?

I have been looking around, and am afraid my sister's beloved (and heavily used ibook may have a common problem. Just now, she was trying to access our myspace page, but it was loading terribly slowly, so she tried to force quit - and it wouldn't quit. So she forced it to quit by holding down apple/option escape and then shut it down. On turning on the machine again, it began booting normally, but very slowly - the grey wheel was spinning a minute or more later, and she could not use force quit to stop the machine from booting.
I advised her to hold down the power button for five seconds to force the machine to shut down, and told her that tomorrow I would come over and run maintenance on it and also post her problem here. From the reading I've been doing, it sounds scarily like the logic board thing, but it's also true she has very little space left on her hard drive, so it could be that - or maybe something else entirely? I intend to start from her system disc, do the hardware test, repair and verify the permissions, and, if necessary, reinstall the system. Is there anything else we should do?
It's an ibook g4 1.2mhz, with at least 640 megs of ram but only a 30 gb hard drive. TIA for your help! Oh - she's running panther, and has had the machine for 3 years with no serious problems, except that hers had one of the defective batteries. Apple sent her a replacement battery two years ago.

Hi Mary.
I ideally you need to keep at least 15% of the HD capacity for the system to run smoothly. On a 30GB drive it's easy to use more than you should. Having less free space would make a big difference to the performance. Sounds like a good time to get rid of/back up unneccesary files that don't need to be on the HD. Also, the HD may have become quite fragmented which would also play a part in slowing things down. Once you have things backed up, could be a good time to reinstall a fresh system. You should notice an improvement.

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