OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)

Question

I've installed Lion on my iMac (24-inch, Early 2008, 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM) and it has become INCREDIBLY slow. I've heard many people saying that the machine would return to its typical blazing speeds after indexing finished, and it has — I've left it on overnight a couple of times to make sure everything finished, and it's still much slower than it was while running Snow Leopard. Virtually every application hangs — when typing in Finder (for example to rename a folder) the text lags several seconds behind what I'm typing. Mission Control is terrible — the graphics lag behind and it takes several seconds for the animation to finish. Often the animation doesn't appear at all, and it just flickers between frames awkwardly until the mission control display finally appears.
I'm working on backing up all my data and doing a clean install … I'll see what happens, but if it doesn't work I'm going to have to roll back to snow leopard, because this is ridiculous. I've never seen an OS change slow down a machine so much since Vista … hopefully it's fixable. Any thoughts on what might be the cause?
(Oh, and activity monitor scans look normal … nothing's hogging the CPU, and there's slightly less than 2GB of RAM free almost all the time.)

Answer 1

Ok guys I had the exact same problem but I think I found a solution. I just did it about 30 minutes ago and since then my MBP is running just like it used to with snow leapord. No gaurantees that i fixed the problem but this is what i did. I went to Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility. I then ran a verify disk scan and found that there were many problems with me Macintosh HD drive. It said I needed an install disk of lion to fix. Since there is no disk I thought I would experiment and this is what I did.
     1) shut down my computer and then started it back up while holding down the alt key. (this should bring up two disk options to run your computer)
     2) I chose the second option (I believe it is called something like "recovery disk" but dont quote me on that. you want to select the one that is NOT Macintosh HD)
     3) It loaded and then gave me four choises of what to do. I clicked disk utility.
      4) From there I ran the verify disk scan again then clicked repair disk.
     5) I then ran the verify disk perrmissions scan and then repaired those as well.
     6) then I restarted my computer and spotlight indexed the computer (i let it do its thing without running any programs) once it was done my computer worked so much faster and for the first time I can say, I AM GLAD I HAVE LION! I hope this is a permenant fix. Please let me know if you try this and how it works for you
Good Luck!!!