IMac constant spinning beachball, tried everything

Any suggestions would be very appreciated. Here's what I've got:
iMac G5 w/ 2x512 RAM and an airport card installed after the fact, ran fine for a couple years until now. Now it gives me a spinning beach ball every minute or so for 30 seconds up to several minutes of spinning. Happens when I run just about any program, even when only one program is running at a time. Seems to be when an action would start executing that triggers it sometimes (but not always). Doesn't seem to be hard drive related, but rather when it needs RAM. Tested the RAM with memtest and it passed everything. It's also got plenty of free hard drive space (24GB).
Here's what I've tried so far:
- Ran the disk permissions and disk repair
- Ran applejack
- Uninstalled tons of programs
- Monitored the performance and I don't see any spikes in CPU/network/HD access/memory usage when it spins
- Tried disabling processes one-by-one to see if it would help, no luck
- Restarting doesn't help, keeps doing it pretty much right away after restart
- Leaving it off for a while has no effect
- Cleared all caches, no effect
- Ran a virus and a spyware utility, found nothing
- Did a manual fsck in single user mode
- Ran memtest on RAM, came up no errors
- Disabled HD sleep, no effect
- Disabled airport and using ethernet cord instead, no effect
- Disabled spotlight indexing
- Disabled Google notifier
- Disabled dashboard widgets
Basically, I've run through everything I could find searching for suggestions online and nothing has had any effect at all so far. I'm completely out of ideas at this point aside from a complete reinstall which I'd like to avoid if possible (I need this machine for work and I'm already behind as a result of this, don't want to have to reinstall everything...).
The only other things I can think of is that I use Apache/PHP/MySQL for work, but I'm not making any Apache or MySQL requests when it freezes. I also have nothing extra running via Cron either.
Oh, and ordinarily when one program gives the spinning beach ball you can switch to another program and use that in the meantime (at least in my experience). In this case, trying to do that causes both programs to spin, even the finder/dock.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance,
Lux

Doesn't seem to be hard drive related, but rather when it needs RAM.
Well, my bet, lux55, is that you have a problem with the availability of unfragmented HD space for use as "virtual memory".
24 Gig probably sounds like plenty of free space to you , but unless you have defragged the drive by either cloning it to an external, erasing the internal, and cloning back, or by using a good defrag utility, like iDefrag, then your free space is probably very seriously fragmented after a couple of years of use.
OSX looks after file fragmentation well, but it does this at the expense of INCREASED free space fragmentation. Virtual memory needs contiguous free space for effective usage. If it can't find the space then things can get very slow. Personally I try to never let the 250 Gig drive on my own iMac G5 get below 50 Gig free.
It may also be that your directories are seriously fragmented. Some disk utilities, like diskwarrior, can deal with this, but a full defragmentation of the drive (by cloning, or use of a good defrag utility like iDefrag, would probably be the best solution).
Cheers
Rod

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