Since 10.4.10: iLife Apps don't quit, system slow, protection issue, no QT

Question

Hello.
Since upgrading to 10.4.10 I've been experiencing a number of weird happenings, which I'll list below under their respective application names.
Address Book
Launches and works fine, but won't quit normally. Gives the spinning beach ball of death and shows as 'not responding' on the Force Quit menu. I then need to force quit it. I first reverted to an old edition of my AB but the problem didn't go away. I noticed after repairing permissions that I didn't have access to the Address Book plugins directory. I reset the permission for that file but the problem didn't go away.
Safari
Won't quit normally, just like AB. Also, it is slow, slow, slow. I mean like 56k slow, though I have DSL. Firefox seems to work fine. The Quicktime plugin doesn't work in Safari, displays only the 'Q' with a superimposed question mark.
Quicktime
Seems to work on its own.
Mail
Sometimes has to be force-quit. I use a POP account and it is working normally, though it's noticeably slower than normal.
iCal
Launches and works fine, but usually needs to be force-quit.
The other iLife application are either not used by me or I haven't noticed a problem. The first thing I did when the problems appeared was to run Tech Tool, Macscan, and to repair permissions in Disk Utility. None turned-up any problems. I then reinstalled Tiger from CD onto an external drive, ran s/w update, and copied my files over to the external drive. The same issues occur even when I boot from that drive. I haven't seen any other posts quite like this one, so I wonder if the problem is related to the upgrade or s/t else. I haven't been able to think of what that might be, however.
I'm not sure what I should do next.
Thanks for your help!
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.10)   1.2 GHz, 1.25 GB, 160 GB (70GB Free)

Answer 1

OK
Sorry I didn't answer sooner, my subscription to this thread did not email your post to me as requested ... but enuff excuses.
The issue could be in your preferences, but so many apps are involved you'd need to be careful on that one. If you trash your mail prefs, then you'd need to set up your mail account(s) again AND you'd lose any emails you have saved over time. Same for address book etc. if not careful.
So ... lets start with this. These apps all have some interaction with the web. I'd start by trashing your caches folder. Its full of temperary files that will reproduce themselves over time anyway. If one or more of those files were to be corrupt, or not work in 10.4.10, then you know what can happen ... you're living it right now.
Go ahead and trash ~/Library/Caches (the Caches folder inside your Library folder inside the home folder), reboot for luck and see if the issue(s) repeat.
Let me know how it goes.
Slim
MacBook Black 2GB/1GB, iMac G5 (iSight) 2GB/1.5GB, iPod Shuffle   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   Linksys Router, Airport Express, ethernet switch