The Spinning Wheel of Death

Question

For the past couple of months I have been having a problem of the spinning wheel spinning and spinning and spinning, taking seemingly forever to upload a new screen in Safari or a new application from the HD.
I did read several of the posts on the 30+ page discussion regarding freezing of machines after the latest large update of Snow Leopard. Although there seems to be a few times per week such freezing does occur, this is fairly infrequent when compared to the 95% of activity that is falling victim to the Spinning Wheel of Death. I have loved the Apple OS from the moment I began using it 5 or so years ago and this is really the very first time I've had such a frustrating issue with an Apple product (I haven't even experienced the antenna issue with my iPhone 4).
At work I have to use a PC and if this were a PC, I'd do something like check for malware to see if that was slowing the process down. I've done that on my MacBook Pro with the Mac-compatible equivalent to the Malwarebytes program I have at work, but still I get the Spinning Wheel of Death. I've even dumped some recent applications that I downloaded to see if they might have been the cause. Nope.
I don't know how to check which programs are running in the background, so that has not yet been done.If I did, I'd obviously turn off some of those I don't need to start up at login.
Does anyone have a "for Dummies" explanation of what other things I might do to attempt to remedy this situation? It shouldn't take 2-5 minutes for a web page to download or an application to begin.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Gr8ful -
The link baltwo linked is a great one.
I have a couple questions for you, OK?
1. What are you using to check for "malware?"
2. Have you ever checked your Font Book Application in your Applications folder
for duplicates or corrupt fonts? That would be something I would check.
You can open up "Activity Monitor" in your Applications > Utilities folder.
Leave it open on your desktop, and select "All proceesses" rather than "My processes."
Have a look and monitor what kicks in when the beachball appears.
For browser slowness:
Are you emptying your Safari Cache & History lists (assuming you're using Safari as your browser).
Message was edited by: ~Bee