Mac Pro slowing to a snail's pace and hard drive constantly active

My Mac Pro is running very slowly. Programs are slow to load, I frequently get "beach balls" for non-intensive operations, and the hard disk never seems to stop. Both Safari and Firefox are especially slow. This is without running any resource intensive programs like video editors, or Photoshop. My wife is having the same problem on her account on the same computer. I have repaired disk permissions, reset PRAM, manually run the daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance scripts, and even done a reformat and reinstall. Only about 3/8 of the primary hard drive is used. Any help would be appreciated.

Leroy,
I did restart in Safe Mode and the computer seemed to run fine. Then went to System Preferences/Accounts/Login Items and removed what I thought were the suspect programs, namely Shove Box, Butler, and Smart Reporter. I then restarted my computer normally, and left it on all night. Now the computer is back to running very slowly without the suspect programs running. To give you an example, iTunes took over 45 seconds to load completely.
The question I have is how do I tell what programs are not loaded when I boot in Safe Mode and what programs are loaded when do not boot in safe mode. That way I can try to figure out which program is causing the problems. I did review the article you linked to, and could not find anything that looked problematic except that the Caches folder in my Library folder is 905.3 M. As I write this my hard drive is whirling away for no apparent reason.
In reference to The Hatter's comment, that I could have a corrupt Spotlight index or database would that fit in with the facts that we have thus far?

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13" MacBook Pro slows to a snail's pace - constant spinning pinwheel...

My MB Pro was getting a bit slow using Lightroom, so I restarted it. Since then everything is moving at 1% of it's normal rate. About 10 minutes to start up, 15 minutes to transfore 8GB of data to an external FW800 disk, bout a minute for a finder menu pane to respond to a click, immediate spinning pizza wheel on any mouse click. i.e. unusable. There's 25GB of free HD space.
Activity Monitor does't show any apps hogging RAM and this happens when only the finder is open (i.e. no major memory usage). Could it be that one of the 2GB memory chips has become faulty?
Unless I hear otherwise on this forum, I'll try taking one out and then the other.
If that doesn't work, I'd be grateful for any other suggestions.
Many thanks.
Richard

Start the machine up from your most recent OS installer DVD, open Disk Utility from the Utilities menu, select your hard drive in the DU sidebar, click the First Aid tab, and check the hard drive's SMART status near the bottom of the DU window. Is it Verified or Failing?
If it's Verified, click the Repair Disk button and wait for the repair process to be complete. If any errors are reported to have been fixed, run it again until you get a "clean" run in which it's reported that the disk "appears OK."

Why does my mac pro show 182GB of APPS on a 250GB hard drive with 190GB of space available 6.5 GB of photos when I don't have any photos on my laptop (all stored on a separate HD)

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Normally in most cases such as yours, reindexing Spotlight will correct the problem. Try it again.
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716
This seems to be a common problem with Yosemite.
If that does not correct the problem, you may try SMC and PRAM resets:
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295
http://web.archive.org/web/20140711222006/http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379
(This is a guess on my part. No harm can come to the MBP performing these resets.)
The last option is a reinstall of the OSX.
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1) I wanted to remove the optical drive as I rarely use it. Then add a second hard drive in there to give myself more memory.
2) Remove the current 2x4GB RAM slots, and replace them with 2x8GB RAM slots to max it out to 16GB so I can run 64 bit versions of Audio production software.
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Try this:
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Or try a clean test system install on another drive
A must: SmcFanControl 2.2 - a mere 400 rpm extra to keep air cooling up
Try to run w/o externals. MyBook included.
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Run AHT off your OEM DVD.
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DIMM Riser A/DIMM 1: 1 GB
DIMM Riser A/DIMM 2: 1 GB
DIMM Riser B/DIMM 1: 1 GB
DIMM Riser B/DIMM 2: 1 GB
DIMM Riser A/DIMM 3: 0 GB
DIMM Riser A/DIMM 4: 0 GB
DIMM Riser B/DIMM 3: 0 GB
DIMM Riser B/DIMM 4: 0 GB
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It shouldn't run any different really.
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Clean install on new/2nd drive (great excuse for new fast drive);
Clone and then upgrade (worst scenerio)
Clean install followed by running Migration Assistant for everything except applications.
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Gethin R wrote:
Why dont the Mac Pro's with Retina Displays have a CD/DVD drive?
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<Personal Information Edited by Host>

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Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)
About NVRAM and PRAM
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Mac Pro slowing to a snail's pace and hard drive constantly active

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