InDesign 5.5 running very slowly on a new mac with 24GB RAM????

Question

Clean install everything new, everything updated and we're getting spinning wheel and lag on a document that older computers with a fraction of this power aren't having a problem with at all. (These problems persist with other documents of various sizes and complexity.)
specs 2x2.4ghz quad-core intel xeon
24GB 1066mhz RAM
solid state drive for programs
7200RPM drive for files

Answer 1

Tracy, all your replies to go the same place. No real point in 4 replies, just post one with all the info -- we all see them.
Too much RAM... Is there such a thing?
Well, there was a smiley-face for a reason. While I would be lying if I said there was never a bug or a problem from having too much RAM, such problems are extremely rare in modern systems, and you should look pretty much everywhere else for the cause, first. For one thing, your not-the-right-item process listing shows:
PID    Process Name              User       CPU      Real Mem        Virtual Mem
1256   InDesign                  TheBeast   2.3      1.34 GB         2.33 GB
InDesign is only using 1.4 GB of your RAM, though the InDesign process thinks it might be using 2.4 GB of RAM.
One thing it does mean is that your OS X kernel is running in 64-bit mode (well, with 64-bit addressing), which need not have been the case if your machine had less than 4GB of RAM. But there are plenty of people who have InDesign running on such powerful machines. Maybe the problem is your Beast? Again, just kidding.
By the way, you mentioned CS5 in an earlier post. I hope you're aware that CS5.5 files are not backwards-compatible to CS5. If you wish to do work in CS5.5 and open it in CS5, you're going to have some issues. The workaround is to Export the CS5.5 file as IDML, which CS5 can then read.  This isn't really a favored workflow, though. Hopefully you don't plan on doing very much movement between CS5 and CS5.5...