OSX.3.9 crashing like windows and running really slow, pleae advise

Question

My power book G4 has been getting slower over the last few months, and really bad the last 2-3 weeks. I've cleaned off the hard drive (it says I have 4 gig free, but I should have about 10-15 gig free). I've run disk utility, mac sweeper, and tried onyx, run iClean, and nothing has changed. It crashes with the "mac screen of death" (the down fade with multilingual hold down the power button until restart instructions). It crashes about every day now, sometimes 2-3 times. The cursor turns into the spinwheel way too often.
Could someone reccomend a program or procedure to fix this apart from a reformat?
TIA
-jm

Answer 1

You're Welcome -jm!
Something else to look at is System Preferences > Accounts > The affected account > Startup Items.
What is listed there?
For testing, you can also create an new Admin account, to see if the system functions properly, when logged in with that.
Also, I notice that you have marked your question as answered, but have not utilized the Helpful or Solved options. That may be intentional, but, if you are not aware of the benefits, of using that function, here is some information.
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ali b