VERY slow startup/performance - Cocktail?

Question

First off, I have an iMac G5 2 Ghz w/ 512 memory, OSX 10.4.8.
I have two accounts on this because a while back, probably due to a bad font, my entire Adobe CS2 suite suddenly became unusable (interminable beach ball). I deleted the font and trashed my Adobe preference files, but I still had issues. My workaround was to just create a second account and install CS2 on there, and that worked, so good enough for me.
That was several months ago. I'm wondering if it has anything to do with my problem now, which is that my Mac is taking about 30 mins (seriously) to start up, from grey apple screen to plain blue screen to login to my desktop. Once I'm in, I'll suddenly get the beachball for a solid couple minutes while doing things in applications, especially when launching Firefox. Sometimes it'll lock up completely when I try to click out of the screensaver. This has been in the last few days, both accounts.
All I can think is that maybe I've screwed something up sharing files between accounts. I mainly use my 2nd account now, hadn't logged on to the 1st in quite a while, but I finally did last week and then did some flipping back and forth copying things, and it seems like it's been since then that I've had these issues. I've also had to restart by holding the power button because it was hopelessly locked up, which I know is something you should don't.
I've done the whole Disk Utility thing, repair premissions, verify disk, and it corrects a few things but always says I'm OK. I'm wondering now if a cron script maintenance utility like Cocktail would help (I have no freaking idea what a cron script is). I've read in some forums that it can help resolve issues that sounded similar to mine, without having to go into the Terminal or whatever, which I again know nothing about.
I know this is long-winded and I'm repeating some stuff from other topics, but hey, points to whoever answers. I've downloaded Cocktail but I'm kind of scared to run it now, just mainly wondering if I should go ahead and do it, or if not, what. Thanx!
iMac G5   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  
iMac G5   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

You don't need Cocktail to run the maintenance scripts. IIRC, they'll run (at least in 10.4.8) if they hadn't run at their scheduled times when you restart. Alternatively, you can run them yourself in the Terminal.app located in /Applications/Utilities/. Launch it, type in this command followed by hitting the return key (to enter the command):
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
enter your password, carefully, since it won't show up on the screen and hit the return key. When it returns with your username$ (the terminal prompt), quit it.
BTW, you can use any combination of daily, weekly, or monthly or run them one at a time; e.g., sudo periodic daily, runs the daily task.
Whether or not that'll fix your problems, I doubt it. The first thing I'd do is boot the machine with the Apple Hardware Test disk that came with the machine and run the extended tests. Second, I'd put more RAM into that machine. Third reinstall the 10.4.8 COMBO update.
If none of those fix the problem, then reinstall the OS, using the Archive & Install option, saving user and network settings.