Slow when building slideshow, pauses

Question

When I'm working with Keynote in iWork 2008, many of the times I switch to another slide to work on it, I get the spinning beach-ball and a few second pause. This is annoying as I can't just jump around to look at different slides. This delay can be a few seconds to 10-15 seconds. A lot of the time this is related to slides with movies but not always. I did not get this with Keynote 2.
Additionally, it seems that my CPU spikes during this time. I run top on the terminal and even it freezes. Once the machine unfreezes, top sometimes reports something like 700% CPU usage. It does not appear to be swapping much to or from disk during this time. It does not seem to be memory constrained either as I thought that would be a problem. Additionally, the movies are not always resized which I thought might be a delay (having to resize the movies or images on the fly).
Any advice?
So far, I have unsuccessfully tried:
* rebooting machine
* deleting Keynote settings in ~/Library
* running as a different user
Of note:
* I have had Keynote 1 and 2 on this machine but 1 has been deleted and 2 still is on it in iWork.
Are there other settings I can delete from older Keynote versions that are not in the ~/Library directory? Should I delete the older iWork? I hate to delete the older iWork in case I have to go back to it (and finding the DVD again might take time as I moved recently).

Answer 1

I've also been disappointed by the performance of Keynote, even though I am running Keynote 4.0.3 on OS X 10.5.2. What is really frustrating is that the spinning beach ball does not only affect Keynote—it causes the whole machine to go unresponsive for a number of seconds. In most other applications, when a spinning beach ball comes up, one can switch to another application and do something else while the beach ball resolves itself, but not in this case.
This has happened especially in presentations with slides containing QuickTime movies.
Suggestions appreciated.