Safari 5 seems to have slowed the OS for my Admin user account

Question

After installing Safari 5 (now 5.0.2), and after a few Safari hangs and force quits, my OS for my Admin user account has become slow. Opening folders and seeing the contents is slow; moving small documents from folder to folder is very slow; cutting and pasting text in a MS Word document sometimes takes two or three tries, as the text highlighting cursor function has slowed. (Interestingly, Safari's basic click and pageload functions seem to work fairly normally, but with the same highlighting and copy/paste slowness that affects all other programs. Also, my mouse pointer moves quickly as per normal.)
However, I created a new user account as a test comparison and found that the new user account is NOT slow. It works perfectly fine.
Any thoughts on what I should do? Is my original Admin account corrupted? Is it possible to simply move my personal files (Word docs, iTunes songs, bookmarks) to the new user account and then delete my original Administrator account?
What should I do? Thanks everyone.

Answer 1

Well, it was worth a shot.
How full is your hard drive? Always a good starting point for diagnosing slowdowns.
Sometimes running periodic maintenance scripts helps, because it cleans some caches that a Safari reset won't. The scripts are supposed to run automatically in the wee hours of the morning when most people are computing, but the problem is that they only run if the computer is on and not sleeping. Not too realistic.
This article in an excellent series of "keep the Apple sweet" articles talks about the scripts and how to run them manually:
http://thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html
They are less important in later incarnations of Mac OSX as some o the tasks they do were shifted to start-up, but doing them is worth trying.
Also use Activity Monitor to check for a runaway background process. It's possible that this could affect only one user account. If you've not used Activity Monitor before, make sure you change its "Show" option from the default of "My Processes" to "All Processes" or you might miss some nasty troublemakers. Also click in the "%CPU" column header to sort by processor usage. With no user apps running, (basically an idling computer) no single process should demand more than ~5 percent of the processor. Let AM display for a few minutes while you watch it, as some processes toggle back and forth as they activate.
Running any anti-virus software? Most does more Mac-harm than Mac-good.
Keep us posted!
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