Illustrator cs4 slowing down

I have just recently upgraded to adobe cs4 from cs2 and am wondering why now when I copy a file from Illustrator and click on my photoshop it takes a few minutes for photoshop to load up when it is already loaded and I can do nothing but surf the internet while I wait. While using cs2 when I would copy and illustrator file and paste it into photoshop cs2 it worked seemlessly with no lag time. Now I am waiting anywhere from 3-10 minutes just for it to load. Is there a way to speed this up? I went from 2 gigs of RAM previously and recently upgraded to 4 gigs and am seeinig no signifcant difference. Any and all help would be great.  Thanks,

"don't bother trying to save Photoshop files"  A 200MB Grayscale Photoshop PSD file, say 12"x17" with 5 spot channels placed in Illustrator saves in about 3-5 seconds. The exact same file as a DCO2 EPS file (the way we'd been doing it for 10 years because the old image setters liked it that way) takes a little under 10 minutes. Since the surge of all-over printing with file sizes reaching upwards of 34"x48" at 200dpi, the files become cumbersome and barely manageable. Discovered it's better to place than embed when you can, do all of it on a drive outside of your OS and scratch disks, Ram drives work, even if it's just 500MB (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16518). The lag in Illustrator has a lot to do with the Graphics card and your refresh/quality settings. I discovered yesterday the layer preview window settings (the small image box next to the layer tick) are not persistent but the benefit of turning it off is phenomenal, the same applies to Photoshop. Until they fix it, try to make a habit of killing it off first thing.
I can't tell you what to do when Illustrator simply collapses when saving a file. I take a walk.
The lag and stability issues are on both our PowerPCs and our newer machines and the issue belongs to Apple as much as Adobe. 8GB of Ram on top of 2 dual 2.5s and a 2 gig bus (add that to 3 dedicated scratch disks 2GB Ramdisk, an Intel 160GB X-25M SSD the other a 500GB Raid) should be sufficient to copy and paste between applications...  PainterX snaps and pops with no spinning wheel of death, no "not responding" and I've never received "Unable to preview image/ scratch disk full" error during operation even though the file sizes in Painter tend to be much, much larger (resolution, size, and color depth). I'm still interested in seeing Wade's system specs.
Illustrator 10 and Photoshop 7 both run better on our old G4 under 10.2 than their CS counterparts on 10.5. I can wait for the next round of technical improvements on the hardware side, but I have serious reservations about my continued loyalty to the Adobe product line. Something is going to have to change. Perhaps they could offer a Pro version that is a leaner, more geared towards production art with less catering to diva designers.
...and I'd like my Illustrator 10 type tool back with an option to kill open type off forever. An option to apply legacy support in every file (or not) without having to physically chase it through the menus. PDFs embed the typestyle in the art. There should be an option when opening an PDF in Illustrator to outline the type in place before it determines the need to convert it to whatever it feels like at the time.
...why is there an "Expand" button in the Pathfinder dialog box? Why does AI group the objects welded together instead of making them a compound path like they use to (as recently as CS3)?

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