New iMac beach ball and performance

I recently purchased a new iMac direct from Apple.
For months I had been using a Mac Mini at work with Mac OS X 10.6.6.
My new iMac has also been updated to 10.6.6. Also, I have installed the same software on both computers. They are essentially the same.
I was very excited about my purchase since my Mac Mini at work behaved beautifully. No crashes and no beach balls. It ran like butter.
My new iMac has more memory and a newer/faster processor than the Mac Mini at work, so I expected it to be even better.
So far, however, that has not been the case. I don't see any noticeable improvement in how my iMac runs vs the Mac Mini. Worse, my iMac is frequently hit with beach balls that routinely last 10 to 30 seconds per incident. It has been extremely frustrating. Also, the new iMac crashes quite often, which really surprised me. I have to routinely force quit apps and reboot which almost never happens at work.
Any ideas why the older computer seems to perform way better than my brand new one?
Thanks!

Update:
I don't know if this will be useful, but I'm documenting this for the record. Any confirmation of these observations would be most appreciated.
As a Perl programmer (a big reason why I went with iMac in the first place) one of the very first things I did out of the box with my new computer was dig into the terminal and install some Perl modules with CPAN.
I think I did this the very same night I first turned my iMac on. And I can't remember if there was ever a time when I didn't have the beach ball problem.
Eventually I was unable to install new modules or even run CPAN at all. The computer gave me a "permission denied" response even when I was logged in as the root user. I finally learned to solve this problem by going to the Disk Utility and fixing permissions.
I've been using my computer for 30 minutes now and happened to notice I haven't had any beach balls yet. That's a very rare thing for me.
So I'm wondering if the beach ball issues I've been experiencing were related to the stuff I did with CPAN or not.
Anyone ever experienced anything like this?
In the meantime I'll keep an eye on things and report back later with additional observations. Thanks!

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I just recently installed the safari 3.1 update and the security update. My machine is an iMac 2.4 GHz with 10.5.2. Prior to this, the machine only had one freeze (had to power off) which happened a about a month back. Since the update, 2 days ago, the machine seems to show the beach ball more often. On one specific occasion (happened when my son was using it), the Chess game was running, and the mouse cursor turned into a beach ball and everything froze - can only move the mouse cursor/beach ball but nothing else responded. Even hitting the caps lock key took minutes before the caps lock light came on. Me being a windows user for a long time, I was blindly trying to find the keyboard equivalent of ctrl-alt-del to pull up a process list of some kind so that I can kill the offending app. But was not successful, hence I had to power off.
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New iMac beach ball and performance

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