I am extremely disappointed with my imac's speed. should i upgrade the RAM?

I bought this lovely machine so that when i come back home, i can push aside my 12" toshiba work laptop and enjoy working on my music and photos and internet browsing on the imac.
the music (ipod +itunes) and browsing works great, but as soon as i get onto iphoto (v5.0.4), it just takes years to get anything done and sometimes it just closes down on me. i have times that colourful round ball rotaing at times for over 40 minutes! i have just 8,000 photos and i just cannot use iphoto at all. also, i'm not all that savvy (or inclined) to try and figure out other softwares - i just assumed that apple's own software and hardware would combine really well in an application that it is really well known for (digital imaging).
so do you reckon it's a hardware issue (RAM or something like that) or that iphoto isn't upto the task? i would use another software for organising the photos if necessary, but i do quite like the way in which iphoto does the organising - when it works.
hope someone out there has some ideas for me!
cheers

Thank you all for the replies! I'm going to work through what each of you have suggested and see how much it helps. The 40 minutes of processing time is not an exaggeration. In fact, it sometimes takes longer than that - but I think it's hanging - so i've forcibly shut down the application.
Al - cheers for your immediate tips - they have certainly helped. I disallowed other shared libraries, dropped the shadow and reduced the photo size to approximately a small thumbnail and the speed has most certainly improved! it still takes a few minutes every now and then, but it's decidedly better.
Dan - I'll try Onyx (first i'll figure out what it is!) to clean things up, i imagine.
Jerry, thanks for the tip on iphoto buddy. i'll certainly try it when i have the time. it'll also help me keep the photos i don't want everyone to see aside, i imagine!
And Rod - these are all jpegs from my NikonD70, i haven't started shooting RAW as yet, as i have to figure out how to process those first! I'll probably upgrade the RAM to 2gigs and to ilife'06 in the next week or two. I'll go through the routine that you suggested for checking for directory corruption as well.
Thanks a lot to all of you! i'm sure i'll be back on track very soon!
cheers,
sidlal

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