Lion painfully slow. How do I go back to Snow Leopard???

I have just "upgrade" to Lion and my Mac is no unusable.  It runs at 15-20% of the speed it ran at under Snow Leopard, where it ran perfectly.  For instance:
- It takes Word 08 about 7-8 minutes to launch
- It takes Entourage 08 almost as long
- Preview, which used to launch in about a second, now takes 2 minutes
- I was in Firefox and wanted to quit Preview.  The process of going to the dock, clicking on Preview, choosing Quit from the menu and having Preview actually quit to 90 seconds.
- When i finished typing the previous sentence, I had to wait about 15 seconds while the typing on the screen caught up.
- in any application, it takes 5-10 seconds for a menu to open after I click on it
- When I double-click on a word it takes 7-9 seconds for the word to highlight
- When I gesture to move a page up it takes 5-8 seconds for the page to begin to move
- When I click on a different place in a document , it take about 5 seconds for the cursor to move
- This message took me about twenty minutes to type
Is it possible for me to go back to Snow Leopard?
Save me!  Thank you!
Ian

Downgrade Lion to Snow Leopard
1.  Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button.  When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area.  If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing.  SMART info will not be reported  on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Quit DU and return to the installer. Install Snow Leopard.
This will erase the whole drive so be sure to backup your files if you don't have a backup already. If you have performed a TM backup using Lion be aware that you cannot restore from that backup in Snow Leopard (see below.) I suggest you make a separate backup using Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.1.
If you have Snow Leopard Time Machine backups, do a full system restore per #14 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.  If you have subsequent backups from Lion, you can restore newer items selectively, via the "Star Wars" display, per #15 there, but be careful; some Snow Leopard apps may not work with the Lion files.

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    Install Snow Leopard into Parallels in Lion:
                                  [click on image to enlarge]
    Full installation instructions are here:
    http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

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    Apple menu > Software Update.
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