Machine slowdown

Hi.

Yesterday I began experiencing incredibly long stalls within several
applications and, particularly, switching between applications. My
hard drive sounds like it's being accessed in very brief bursts in a
steady rhythm (sounds like a floppy drive formatting!). Besides app
switching, most trouble comes in Mail.app or when accessing the file
system in other apps. Oddly, keyboard commands to quit applications
cause delay, but File/Quit works fine. Something is clearly way off.

This Mac is critical to operating an arts org. that relies on it as a
primary server and usable machine and we're grinding to a halt today.
Any help will be much appreciated.

Context: OSX 10.4.6 on dual 1.25G G4 mirror, 1.25GB Ram.

-Delay happens with even just a few apps open, but mostly when using
cmd-tab to switch apps or using the mouse to click on a another
application's window sitting in the background. It seems less of an
issue (or totally fine?) when using mouse to click in the doc to switch
apps.

-About 5 weeks ago I "upgraded" to Tiger and switched everything to a
larger hard drive at the same time, accepting the installer's offer to
transfer all my files. This has caused some other background processes
to be confused, it seems. For example, Word now has trouble doing
autosaves. For reference, the drive was working fine for months as a
storage drive. I have also repaired file permissions after the install
and yesterday after noticing the trouble.

-An older version of Now up-to-date calendar, which reportedly
doesn't work well with Tiger, remains installed (reminders work
poorly but the calendar works). The top right of the menu bar where
NUDC and other special menus reside, has been trouble ever since the
Tiger install. Spinning beach ball when going for the date or any of
those menus after the first time or two after booting.

I am at a loss on how to begin diagnosing and would appreciate some
diagnostic advice on this or possible solutions. Thanks for any help


.

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