Large Photoshop file has caused system slow down.

I have Dual 2.0Ghz G5 which has worked very well since I got it last Spring. Just recently however I've had some slow downs. There are a number of things that I've noticed such as more frequent spinning beachball and font redraw issues.
These issued started since I was working one a massive Photoshop file. I was doing work on a Trade Show booth which eventually resulted in a 10Gb Photoshop file! I realized I probably should have taken steps to reduce the size of the file but that's neither here nor there. Despite the size of the file I was still quite impressed with the performance of my machine. That said, I've found the general performance of the machine since working on this file to be diminished.
I've done all of the typical maintenace items such as repairing disk and permissions via Disk Utility, clearing caches and running Maintenance scripts using Cache Out X, MacJanitor and Tiger Cache Cleaner, but still the performance of my machine has taken a hit.
It's only since this has happened that I've started launching Activity Monitor to try and determine if there is something obvious going on which is hogging resources or not. This for me has raised questions of what is "Normal" for some common tasks. Presently kernal_task is using under 5% of my CPU with 50 threads running which seems like a reasonable number. But it is also using almost 110Mb of RAM and 1.35Gb of Virtual Memory. Both of those numbers seem quite high to me, but I admit that I never looked at them before so I have no gage as to whether these numbers can be considered normal or not.
By all measures the machine still performs pretty good, but as I use this machine every day I know that it's not the same as it was prior to working on that large file. Is there something else related to Photoshop, temporary files, application caches or anything like that, that I should take a look at?
Any input would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Dual 2.0Ghz G5 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Hi Troy,
First I would try using a separate HD for the scratch disk.As PS tries to read and write,it has to compete with the OS as it tries to hit its swop files. If Version Cue is on, turn it off.Get rid of any virus checking apps.Check your Ram.If you haven't allowed Tiger to run its cron scripts on a regular basis,and only do periodic maintenance, I would take the time to do an Archive and Install, or even wipe the HD,zero it and install tiger again. This I realize is a drastic measure,time
consuming, and a pain.But if your whole system is slowing down?? Or if you get a new drive set it up to be your primary drive first and test your system on it before moving any of your PS files over from the old HD.Use the old HD as scratch disk
Have you included the use of other utilies to check your HD? Drive Genius, Disk Warrior, TechTool Pro.No Norton utilities allowed.Hope this helps as there are a lot of places to look for the problem.

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Large Photoshop file has caused system slow down.

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