New MacBook and The Infinitely Spinning Beach Ball: Anybody Else?

Question

I wonder if I'm the only MacBook owner having this experience, or if there might be some company in my misery?
I purchased a new Aluminum MacBook on Nov.14. This one is the high-end, 2.4GHz model with 4GB of RAM and currently running OSX 10.5.5.
I have in the past few days (or week, or so) encountered what appears to be an intermittent performance failure. I will, for example, be in Apple Mail: Open a new message to compose, and as soon as I click on the open window, the beach balls starts spinning... and continues to spin for a minute or two. Typically, when this starts happening, when I get the cursor back I click again, and the beachball resumes spinning.
This will also happen in Firefox, or, as it did yesterday, even accessing items in the upper-right menu bar. Suspecting an impending hard-drive failure, I clicked the Time Capsule icon in the menu to see when I got my last backup, and instead of getting Time Capsule, I got... the spinning beach ball of death.
The most difficult thing about this dilemma is that it appears to be intermittent. I took the MacBook to the dealer that sold it to me yesterday, was unable to replicate the issues. Everything worked fine in the store. Came home, problem returned for about 10 or 15 minutes, then it went away and the computer performed normally until I closed the lid to go out for the evening.
Then this morning I opened the lid again and.... spinning beach balls for a total of about 17 minutes. And now, again, it appears to be working fine.
While I was at the store, we ran a disc verify in disk utility, and it returned the message "The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK."
This is the worst kind of problem -- the intermittent one. I suspect something in the computer itself, in the believe that hardware issues are more likely to be intermittent than software issues; I could be wrong about that, I dunno.
All I do know is that I can have maddening periods when I can't do anything with the computer, and then, just as suddenly, everything goes back to normal.
So I wonder if there might be anything in the circuitry in these new MacBooks that might be causing a similar problem for others. Or is this my unique cross to bear until the thing goes completely south?
Thanks,
--PS

Answer 1

Have you tried running the diagnostics from the Leopard disc? If not, give it a go to see what it finds. To run it, boot while holding the "d" key (with Leopard disc in ofcourse).
Haven't tried that, I did not know that was on the disk. I'll run it, how long might it take? What sort of tests does it run, what sort of results should I expect?
Another thing to try is reset the SMC.
Following the link you provided suggests there might be some things in the SMC that could be causing my problems. Should I do that before or after I run the diagnostics? Would the diagnostics tell me if that's something I need to do?
If still nothing... perhaps a reinstall of Leopard.
I call that the "Vietnam Solution" -- destroying the village in order to save it. I thought was done with that sort of thing when I abandoned PCs and Windows. Not a desirable outcome.
As a last resort, you might consider trying a new hard drive. A failing drive can cause theses intermittent delays.
That was my initial thought, too. Are there any diagnostics I can run besides dick utility to determine the integrity of the hard drive? Do the diagnostics on the Leopard install disk do that?
Thanks,
--PS