PS CS3 taking a long time to load and seems to "spin" when Reading Preferences.

Question

I've noticed this problem a few days ago, and am unsure what I should do about it. PS used to load very quickly, and now when launching, it will spin for a good 90 seconds while reading the preferences. Is there a way to reset the preferences? Is this a sign of something else?
I'm running PS CS3 10.0.1 on OSX v. 10.4.11. Here's a cut & paste of the system info:
Adobe Photoshop Version: 10.0.1
Operating System: Mac OS 10.4.9
System architecture: PowerPC G5 with AltiVec
Physical processor count: 1
Processor speed: 2000 MHz
Built-in memory: 1024 MB
Free memory: 384 MB
Memory available to Photoshop: 979 MB
Memory used by Photoshop: 67 %
Image cache levels: 6
Photoshop scratch has async I/O enabled
Scratch volume(s):
Macintosh HD, 148.9G, 58.6G free
Primary Plug-ins folder: Macintosh HD:Applications:Adobe Photoshop CS3:Plug-Ins:
Additional Plug-ins folder: not set

Answer 1

Not to answer for Buko, but he may be asking what happens if you were a brand new install? In other words when the PS application first creates the preference files.
I have similar issues with PS and Illustrator CS3, more than any time before. Frankly they load a lot of crap. I noticed that this was especially pronounced for CS3 applications.
Denise, my main machine is a G5 Quad Processor running at 2.5 Ghz and I have 16 gigs of RAM. It takes PS and Illustrator about 30 to 40 seconds to load. My point is that we have very similar machines but that I have a bit more muscle and I am getting a comparable time. Imagine if you had my machine you might get the slightly reduced start time. Its not a happy situation but our machines are getting slightly long in the tooth.
A lot of modern apps on the Mac are now using XML files for prefs and they have a habit of getting damaged and corrupted. I would manually locate them in your User directory and remove all of them by hand. Then you should do something that most do not consider.
Optimize your drives with a tool like Tech Tool or Disk Warrior. A fragmented drive severely affects PS operation in 3 ways:
1st: If you watch the PS splash screen as it loads, its loading a long list of pieces, if those are scattered across many disconnected sectors, thats slow.
2nd: If your scratch drive is pooched, that will slow down Photoshop. Don't forget what a scratch really is, its virtual memory, in other words fake RAM. BTW it never a good idea to have Photoshop and/or your OS on the same partition as your documents and scratch drive. If your hard drive is big enough, partition it or spring for another drive, they are cheap.
3rd: If your image/PS documents are on fragmented drives, again slow pokes. PS struggles to pull the sectors together.
Your info above was helpful but I could not tell what how much RAM you have, is it really 1 meg? Thats really small, more RAM will help a lot, then there is less scratch disk usage.
Finally another factor in speed, what is your dives spindle speed and access time? Faster is better.
Much luck.